


let me in if i break (and be quiet if i shatter)

by kafkas



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Angst, Diplomacy, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02, Religious Conflict, Slow Burn, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-18 01:07:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28609566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafkas/pseuds/kafkas
Summary: ‘You can look at me,’ Din says, ‘The helmet’s in my speeder. It wasn’t stolen.’ In his unease he has adopted a sharp tone that probably just sounds angry to Cobb’s ears. He tries hard to gentle his voice. ‘I’m sorry. This must be... very strange.’‘Not as strange as I imagine it is for you.'Din finds himself drawn to Mos Pelgo once again. Turns out, he couldn't have come at a better time.// Sorry for the delay everybody! I am aiming to have Chapter 4 up before Feb 20th //
Relationships: Din Djarin/Cobb Vanth
Comments: 120
Kudos: 365





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> \- Trigger warnings for each chapter are in the endnotes!  
> \- Title is from Weyes Blood's [_Andromeda_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StSEXZcwOB4)  
> 

He ends up flying out with Shand and Fett. Cara had implored him to accompany her all the way to Chandrila, clearly delighted by the prospect of depositing a shackled Moff Gideon at the very foot of the Galactic Senate. Din had politely but firmly refused. The thought of visiting a place as crowded as Hanna City in his current state – of being made to sit through some interminable assembly, or, _Mand’alor_ forbid, a _banquet_ , thrown in their honour… It was enough to make Din break out in a cold sweat.

And, though a part of him was ashamed to admit it, Cara’s gleeful attitude had quickly begun to grate on him. As far as she was concerned, they’d all gotten what they wanted, and there was no call for any sadness. And Din didn’t think he had it within himself to explain to her that, for him, getting what he had wanted felt just as terrible as if he hadn’t.

Bo-Katan had, at this point, succumbed to her injuries. She’d fallen asleep in one of the pilot’s chairs and nobody had had to the heart to wake her. Before they’d all parted ways, Din had set the darksaber down beside her, now that she couldn’t exactly object. Koska had fixed him with a grim look.

‘She’ll only come after you,’ she said, ‘The saber _must_ be won in battle.’

Din had inclined his head toward her leader’s prone form. ‘She gonna fight me like that?’

Koska pursed her lips, unamused. ‘Gideon was right, you know. The power _is_ in the story. And Bo doesn’t lie.’

Din had shrugged. ‘She’d better start.’

Koska’s brows formed a deep, scowling ‘v’ beneath her braids. ‘Are you at least going to tell me where you’re going?’

He’d turned away.

Now, tearing through hyperspace aboard _Slave I_ , Din wonders idly where they’ll look for him first. Nevarro, probably, though Din doubts he’ll ever go back there. It occurs to him suddenly, like a quick, cold knife slipped beneath his ribs, that he is more untethered now than he has ever been before. He has no covert to return to, no ship in need of repair. Grogu is gone. If he were to simply lay down in some quiet, green place and let nature run its course, all that would remain of him would be his _beskar’gam_. And even _that_ , he supposes, does not technically belong to him anymore. He has removed his helmet in front of others. Clan law dictates he must forfeit his belongings and go immediately into exile.

From across the hold, Shand regards him coolly, legs stretched out before her.

‘You can put it back on,’ she says, gesturing to the helmet, ‘I won’t say anything. Neither will Boba. Not sure about those crazy Nite Owl girls, but…’

Din shakes his head, smiling wanly. ‘Too many have seen. Besides, it was my choice.’

And it was. That is the part that tears at him. With Mayfeld and IG-11, Din had at least been able to tell himself his hand was forced. That he hadn’t broken his vows, not fully. That nearly everyone who’d seen him was dead, and that Mayfeld – a fugitive, alone in enemy territory – was as good as. So many rationalizations to protect himself from the simple, dirty truth of the matter: that removing his helmet had, for a brief, giddying moment, felt _good_. 

Shand is still watching him, as unerring as a hawk. Din pictures his internal crisis like some sort of bad holo, splashed across his face. He is not used to having to school his expressions.

‘I have a daughter,’ Shand announces, conversationally. It takes Din by surprise – so much so that at first, he believes he’s misheard her. ‘Seventeen-years-old,’ she elaborates, ‘Lives on Corellia, with her mother.’

‘Oh.’ Din shifts, discomforted. ‘Are you two still –?’

Shand shakes her head and laughs, just once – a dry bark utterly devoid of mirth. ‘No. Not for a long time now. My line of work, Marit found it – difficult. And the Dune Sea was no place to raise a child.’ She’s looking past him, out the starboard viewport. ‘… But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss them. I think about them every day. Every hour, probably. Even after all these years, anything can trigger a memory – a piece of music, a smell…’

She smiles – just a slight, pinched thing – and for a moment, Din can imagine how Shand must have been twenty, thirty years ago, before the world made her hard. A Fennec Shand who had used her hands not for killing, but for far more mundane tasks: mixing caf for a sleeping spouse, gently combing the tangles from a child’s unruly hair.

‘But,’ she continues, ‘missing them is better than spending every day wondering if they’re safe. Wondering if that firespeeder is headed to Marit’s work, if there’s been an accident. If Aya is late home from school because she’s playing with a friend, or because someone from my past has found her and knows that they can use her against me.’ She fixes Din with a look that brooks no argument. ‘You did good by that kid, Mando. You did the hard thing – the right thing – even though it hurt. That’s real parenthood, not that lovey-dovey crap they sell you in holos.’

Din swallows down the rising lump in his throat. ‘Do you ever see her?’

‘Who?’

‘Your daughter.’

‘Oh.’ Shand pauses, looking faintly dismayed, as if only now realizing just how much she has disclosed. ‘Sometimes. Once a year or so. Marit would prefer it if I didn’t come at all. Says I’m tempting fate, and maybe I am, but… I’d like it if I could set up shop in Corellia one day. Be there for Aya properly.’

‘Why don’t you?’ Din asks, ‘I’m sure the Guild will void your bounty, once they hear about Gideon. You’re basically untouchable now – a hero of the Republic.’

Shand shakes her head, smiling grimly. ‘No, not yet. I’ve got some things I need to take care of first. Things that the Republic might not look on so charitably.’

**________________________**

Those ‘things’ turn out to bring them by way of Tatooine. Din can’t honestly say he’s surprised. The place is like a lodestone – or rather, it’s the sunken hollow at the centre of the universe that all other things seem to slide down into. A final resting place.

Yet there is some comfort to be found in the bleached, wind-blasted expanse of its desert, the dangers there manifold and yet familiar, manageable. Fett had offered Din a share in whatever he and Shand had planned – ‘It’ll be a long job, but profitable’; an invitation which Din once again chosen to politely decline. He could sense from the other man’s furtive bearing that this was somehow deeply personal – for both he and Shand – and that Din’s being there would only be a hindrance.

In the end, he merely asked to be put down in Mos Espa with enough credits to rent a speeder.

‘I’ll pay you back later,’ he assures Shand.

‘Oh, kriff off,’ she snorts, and wrenches the landing bay door shut.

Din watches as _Slave I_ grows steadily miniscule and eventually disappears entirely beyond the shimmering horizon, in no great hurry to be on his way. It is very early morning on Tatooine, the planet’s triplicate moons still faintly visible up above, and the sand is pleasantly cool in the long blue shadows thrown up by Mos Espa’s scant masonry. Din stands for a long while, savouring the feeling of the breeze in his hair, on the back of his neck. He has not donned his helmet again – for a myriad of reasons, the simplest of them being that it would only draw unwanted attention. It and the rest of his armour are in the heavy duffel bag slung over his shoulder, save for his breastplate, which he’d strapped on beneath the loose-fitting tunic Fett had loaned him. His _bevii’ragir_ , collapsed, hangs from his belt, and could easily be mistaken for a walking stick by somebody not in the know. For the first time in nearly forty years, he looks utterly normal: just another struggling trader, come to peddle their wares in some backwater town.

He rents a jumpspeeder from the first agency he comes across. The Aqualish who takes his deposit barely spares Din a glance, gaze rooted to the holo-projector mounted on the wall above him.

‘What’s that?’ Din asks, gesturing to the film that’s playing.

The Aqualish looks at him like he’s simple. ‘Y’been living in a sarlacc’s belly? That’s _The Robot’s Mistress!_ Season 8: Episode 33: _Broadside at Cassiopeia._ It’s a classic holodrama, my friend.’

‘Right,’ Din says. He’s never watched a soap opera. Never watched any holos, actually.

Having caught his attention, the Aqualish peers at Din now, no doubt taking in his battered appearance, the bone-tired slump of his shoulders. ‘Say, where’re you headed on this thing?’ he probes, and, quickly interjecting before Din can concoct a suitable lie: ‘I only ask because there’s been some lawlessness out Freetown way, and I’d rather you not bring one of my speeders round them parts.’

‘Freetown?’

‘Ah, begging your pardon – _Mos Pelgo._ Some folks round here call it Freetown, on account of the escaped slaves what live there.’ 

Din feels a prickle of disquiet. ‘You said lawlessness?’

The Aqualish shrugs, attention already drifting back to _The Robot’s Mistress._ ‘Yuh-huh. Sand People, I think. Some sort of turf war.’

Din quickly finishes filling out the flimsi-work and returns it in exchange for his speeder’s keycode. ‘There anywhere I can fill up on water round here?’ he asks.

The Aqualish cackles as if Din has just told a very clever joke. ‘Hah! Yeah _right!_ ’

**________________________**

As it happens, most of Mos Espa’s vaporators have been knocked out by a recent sandstorm, and those whose moisture farms are still up and running are exceptionally stingy with their produce. Din ends up leaving town with barely two canteens’ worth of water. He might have hung around and haggled for more, but by midday Mos Espa had grown crowded, and it was as if he could feel people’s eyes on him, like insects scuttling over his exposed flesh. Besides, he’s eager to reach Mos Pelgo as quickly as possible. What the Aqualish had told him may have been pure conjecture – the musings of a bored bookkeeper with too much time on his hands – but nevertheless, Din can’t stay the niggling fear that, if something _has_ happened to Mos Pelgo and its inhabitants, it will have been partly his fault. After all, he’d deprived them of their greatest defence, hadn’t he? He had demanded Cobb Vanth hand over the stolen _beskar’gam._

 _Not stolen,_ Din’s conscience corrects, gently. _Repurposed._ The marshal had only been trying to do right by his people, and, when push came to shove, wasn’t that the fifth sacred tenet of the _Resol’nare_? 

_The marshal_. Din frowns, tightening his grip on the speeder’s handlebars. He hasn’t had much cause to think about Cobb since leaving Mos Pelgo, several weeks ago now. He’d been particularly bitter upon returning to Mos Eisley – that much he remembers. Bitter and strangely sad.

 _Yet another person I’ll never see again_ , he had thought. _Another person who will, eventually, forget me._ Since he was eight-years-old, his life has been punctuated by these sorts of non-starter relationships. Solidarities forged in times of crisis that never quite progressed towards friendships. Sparks of attraction that Din would not allow – _could_ not allow – to develop into romances.

And he really had _liked_ Cobb, after the initial shock of seeing him in the _beskar’gam_ had worn off. He’d treated Din like a person – which meant more than just being friendly. Cobb had been unfriendly too, at times. Brash and nosy and argumentative. He’d taken the piss, as if Din wasn’t a figure out of myth, as if he hadn’t been trained to kill cocksure men like Cobb in over a dozen different ways. When they’d spoken, he’d looked Din right in the t-visor. It had been refreshing. Too often, people were afraid to look at him directly.

More than all of these things, however, he had liked Cobb because he was decent. It took no small degree of fortitude to look out for others in a world where it was so exceedingly difficult to even look out for oneself.

So, yes, Din had been sorry to leave Mos Pelgo, though Cobb had only asked him to stay just the once. Not trying to _persuade_ Din, per se, only floating the thought that, perhaps, Grogu could benefit from some stability. That Din himself looked as if he needed time to convalesce. It was all suggested casually, with none of Omera’s sad-eyed yearning – a bait that the Mandalorian could either bite or choose to swim away from.

Din had, as was customary, turned him down. He’d had Grogu to care for – no longer was his life so lonely that he might consider abandoning his line of work permanently. Now, however…

Din, bedded down for the night, scrubs at his eyes with the back of a hand. The movement is only reflexive. He refuses to weep. That he had done so in front of five people who were essentially strangers – Cara and Grogu notwithstanding – appals him.

He refuses to weep, but he is helpless to stop himself from _aching._ If the universe were in any way kind or just, right now he would have his nano-cooker out, and he’d be heating the water for Grogu’s bath. He would have made camp earlier – given himself time to build a fire, to make them dinner – instead of gunning his speeder well past sundown. Now, having forgone food entirely, Din lies pressed up against an overhanging rockface, the solidity of it a comfort, somehow. He does not light a fire. He does not keep a watch, either – by choosing to sleep, the only person he is endangering is himself.

In those hazy moments just before unconsciousness claims him, Din thinks he hears something yowling out on the sand. A dunecat, perhaps, or a womp weasel – he isn’t familiar enough with the local fauna to know for certain. Din fancies that it sounds lonely, though this is likely just some sad form of anthropomorphism. There is no sympathy to be found out on the Dune Sea.

**________________________**

Aboard _Slave I_ , Fett had pumped him full of enough black-market painkillers to fell a bantha, muttering that Din would thank him for it later. After a long day’s ride in the scorching heat and an even longer night spent curled up, shivering beneath his cloak, Din finds that he concurs. He wakes before dawn with terrible cramps in his legs and arms, the pain so pointed and excruciating it is as if someone has taken a laserdrill to the base of his spine. When he is finally able to move again, a cold sweat has broken out across his brow, at the base of his neck. He is so nauseous in the aftershock of this episode that he has to force himself to eat his dry rations – goes to the trouble of puréeing them in hot water to make them more palatable – only to halt his speeder, lean over the side and heave it up an hour later.

All of this he has dealt with before – all of it part and parcel for a life spent pushing oneself beyond the point of exhaustion. What truly worries Din is the strange bouts of disorientation he’s been feeling, as if his internal compass has suddenly been knocked entirely of kilter. If the speeder’s inbuilt GPS decides to give up the ghost, as it has threatened to do several times now already, Din has no doubt that his usually infallible sense of direction will, in this instance, desert him.

Other things, too: the headache that never seems to go away, no matter how symoxin he takes; the persistent case of tinnitus he appears to have developed – subtle at first, a mere background hum, but quickly increasing to a volume that can be heard even over his speeder’s engine.

Concussed, Din deduces – cold, clinical diagnosis waylaying some of the rising dread. Likely from when Gideon’s dark trooper had jack-hammered Din’s head against the cruiser hull. Some things even _beskar’gam_ can’t protect you from.

When he finally reaches Mos Pelgo, Din’s vision is blacking out in intervals that are growing alarmingly frequent. He falls, when he dismounts from his speeder, and rises with the disturbing impression that he has lain unconscious for several minutes. Nobody is around to tell him otherwise. He has arrived much later than intended. Tatoo I has already sunk well beyond the horizon, Tatoo II only a pale pink afterthought against the darkening sky. The town’s main concourse, though lit, is eerily quiet. The people here toil so hard during the day, all anyone wants to do after eating dinner is sleep. If Din were a stranger to this place, he might have mistaken it for a ghost town, laid waste to by some syndicate.

As it happens, he’s not a stranger, and knows just which door will still be open to him so late at night.

The Weequay barkeeper, Pedge, glances up when Din enters the saloon, but otherwise pays him no great mind. It occurs to Din that without his helmet or his _beskar’gam,_ he is virtually unrecognizable, and so he hovers in the doorway jumping through some complicated mental hoops, trying to decide just how best to introduce himself.

Pedge, thankfully, beats him to it. ‘Late hour to be travelling,’ he observes, and Din could almost sob out of sheer gratitude. He is, also, quietly thrilled. In Din’s experience, barkeepers tend to quickly serve him his drink before vacating that section of the bar, or otherwise tell him to leave outright. There’s never been any small talk. Din wonders if he has a face that encourages it – if he’s… what’s the word? _Approachable_. 

‘Hope you didn’t run into any trouble out there,’ Pedge continues, ‘Mos Pelgo’s safe, don’t get me wrong, but the desert at night…’

Din clears his throat, which is as dry as a dust. ‘No trouble,’ he croaks.

The Weequay’s eyes widen. ‘Woah there! But you sound like a massiff with a bone caught in his craw. You’re here for a drink, I take it?’ 

‘Just water, and –’ Din almost asks for a bowl of blue milk, out of habit, before pulling himself up short. ‘Just a glass of iced water, thank you.’

‘Expensive tastes,’ Pedge remarks, bending down to retrieve a bottle from the saloon’s small refrigeration unit. Din lowers himself onto the nearest chair, wincing as his knees cry out in protest. ‘You just passing through? Because if it’s room and board you’re looking for, I’m afraid Mos Pelgo’s sorely lacking in that department. Though you’re welcome to kip on the floor in here, if you’re craving a roof over your head.’

Din would crawl inside a tauntaun if it meant having somewhere warm to fall asleep. However, there are more pressing matters to attend to. ‘I’m looking for somebody, actually.’

‘Oh?’ Pedge pauses in reaching for a glass, just the barest hint of suspicion entering his bearing.

‘Cobb Vanth? Last I heard he was marshal round here.’ When the Weequay doesn’t answer – and what a thing, Din thinks, to inspire such stubborn loyalty – he leans forward. ‘I’m not a bounty-hunter,’ he says, quietly, ‘I just want to talk. Vanth… he once did me a kindness. I’d like to thank him, if he’s still here.’

‘He’s not,’ Pedge snaps, and something in Din’s disappointed expression must move him, because he softens a moment later. ‘He’s not here,’ the barkeeper elaborates, ‘but he’ll be back tomorrow night.’

The relief that washes over Din leaves him feeling slightly lightheaded. If Cobb hadn’t been in Mos Pelgo – if he didn’t want to see him – Din has no idea where he would have gone next. He knows nobody on this planet, save Peli Motto, and he doesn’t think he could stomach explaining Grogu’s absence to her. Perhaps he would have just driven out into the waste; driven until he used up all his fuel and then walked until his legs gave out. Not the quiet, green glade Din imagines, when he imagines laying down to die, but as good a place as any in the grand scheme of things.

Pedge places his water down on the table, so cold the glass is already sweating. ‘That’ll be fifteen credits,’ he says, grimacing apologetically.

Almost all the money Din has left in the world, and he can’t bring himself to care. He reaches for the pouch tied around his waist. However, to his extreme annoyance, he can’t seem to get the zipper open.

Pedge’s craggy brow furrows in concern. ‘You alright there?’

‘I’m _fff_ -fine,’ Din stammers, even though his fingers are numb, and his hands are suddenly shaking so violently they rattle the table.

‘I don’t think you are,’ the Weequay says, crouching down beside him. He grasps Din’s bare wrists in his hands, forcibly stilling them, and Din isn’t sure if it’s the shock of skin-on-skin contact, or just his swiftly deteriorating health, that makes it feel as if he’s been sucker-punched in the abdomen. He retches, folding at the waist.

‘Son of a Hutt,’ Pedge curses, staggering to his feet. Din sees him sprint out the door and thinks he might be calling for somebody, but can’t be certain. All he can hear is the pounding rush of blood in his ears – _katoush, katoush, katoush_ – and above it, the high whine of tinnitus that’s been dogging him since this morning.

The water is still sitting there on the table, forgotten. Din grapples for it, deciding that, if he’s going to die from some sort of seizure, he might as well go out having gotten his money’s worth. It’s as he’s doing this, however, that his vision abruptly warps, turning the distance between his hand and the glass into a kind of insurmountable chasm. Then, inexorably, the world begins to tilt on its axis, and Din feels himself sliding from his chair. He is, thankfully, unconscious before his head cracks against the concrete floor. 

**________________________**

He drifts in and out of consciousness over the course of the next twenty-four hours. He is dimly aware of being hoisted to his feet by two burly miners and half-walked, half-carried out of the saloon. They pass his jumpspeeder on their way down the concourse, and Din wants to ask for the duffel bag containing his _beskar’gam,_ his _bevii’ragir._ He tries to speak, but his mouth feels stuffed full of cottonwool.

When he next gains consciousness, his field of vision is dominated by the face of an elderly human woman, her skin nut-brown and wrinkled like crushed velvet. She calls something over her shoulder in a language Din doesn’t understand, and a bespectacled Qiraash enters the room, battered old med-kit in hand. Din starts – something about being administered to while insensate makes him nervous, though these people doubtless mean him no harm. The old woman clucks her tongue and gently forces him back down onto a pile of roughly woven cushions. A needle is slipped beneath his skin, too quickly for Din to object, and a different kind of sleep claims him now, syrupy and medicinal.

His impressions from that moment onward are badly fractured. Somebody sponging at his forehead with a cold compress. A hand at the base of his skull, bony but possessed of a wiry strength, raising Din’s head so that somebody else can lift a ladle of tepid water to his lips.

The quality of the darkness greys slightly as the suns begin to rise, but the room that they have housed him in is still blessedly cool and dark – even the poorest Tatooineans possess powerful AC systems. The cold is only a temporary reprieve, however. Soon the sweat dries on Din’s skin and he begins to shiver, uncontrollably. Later he will remember with some embarrassment attempting to pull a blanket over himself, only to tip a lamp onto the floor. He tries to apologise to the old woman, but the words hover maliciously out of reach, frustrating him to the point of angry tears.

By the time evening falls, he’s in a kind of semi-slumber, not quite comfortable enough to fall asleep but no longer jarred into wakefulness by sudden aches and spasms, for which he’s grateful. His head has been bandaged tightly, and the skin beneath is numb and vaguely prickly. Some kind of bacta poultice, Din supposes – nobody in Mos Pelgo could afford a spray bottle, let alone a full-blown tank.

He has just let one of his carers remove his sweat-soaked tunic – a seemingly monumental effort that leaves Din faint and breathless – when he hears a familiar voice in the next room over.

‘Well, did he give his name?’

Pedge: ‘I didn’t ask. He was – cagey. But he wanted to see you. Said you’d met. I thought, maybe, a mercenary, but Cobb…’ The Weequay lowers his voice, and Din struggles to catch what he says next. He thinks he hears the word _armour._ He glances at his breastplate, abandoned on the low table beside the bed, and winces. Foolish of him to wear it – doubtless now they believe him a thief. But he’d needed it, for peace-of-mind as much as for protection. To be entirely deprived of his _beskar’gam_ had felt – perverse.

Din shuts his eyes when the bedroom curtain is pushed aside, golden light spilling onto the adobe floor. Cowardly, to pretend to sleep like this, but he does not have the energy to face Cobb just this minute, to explain.

A moment passes. Din fancies that he feels the marshal’s gaze on him – not the scarab-like scuttle of a stranger’s regard, something that still makes Din cringe inwardly, but a slight, benign _press_. He has hazel eyes, if Din remembers correctly – green shot with brown. A mole beneath the right, or is it the left? Xi’an had told him once that on Ryloth, blemishes such as these held specific meanings. A mole beneath the eye was called a _shalla-hari,_ or _tear spot_. Bearers were said to be destined for a lifetime of sadness. 

It is as Din is remembering this little titbit that darkness abruptly engulfs the room once more, Cobb taking his leave. When he speaks again, it is in a tone that Din has never heard him take before, and certainly not with any of the townsfolk. Quiet but furious. Laying into Pedge for not recognizing Din’s voice in the saloon, berating the others for not seeing his armour and putting two and two together. _Mother of Moons, the man had saved their lives!_

‘And which one of you kriffin’ bishwags took his helmet off?’ Cobb exclaims. ‘Damn it Jo, you know he doesn’t – that it’s against his – ah, hell.’

There follows a period of furious murmuring – this Jo woman asserting her innocence, others jumping to her defence. And then Pedge, rising above: ‘He weren’t wearing it when he came by the saloon, Cobb.’

‘What?’

‘His helmet. I ain’t seen it.’

A soft sound of disbelief from Cobb. ‘What? No. But that’s… he doesn’t…’

What Pedge says next makes Din wish he’d never come back to Mos Pelgo. That he’d just stayed on his speeder and ridden until his body gave out on him.

‘I, uh… ain’t seen the little green fella either, come to mention.’

Silence from Cobb, from everybody. Din screws his eyes shut, tears threatening to spill from their corners and soak into the carefully wrapped poultice. He wants to shout himself hoarse – probably would do, if he weren’t prevailing upon these people’s hospitality.

When Cobb does, finally, speak, all of the anger has drained out of his voice. Now he just sounds sad. ‘Let’s… let’s let him rest,’ he says, ‘Malachor knows he needs it. I’ll try talking to him in the morning, see if I can’t take him off your hands. And – Jo, I’m sorry for… That was way out of line.’

‘It’s okay,’ Jo murmurs. 

‘No, it’s not. I was an asshole.’ Cobb claps his hands together, the sound muffled by the pourstone wall and thick curtains. ‘Alright folks: show’s over. Clear out. Let’s give Jo and Grete their living-room back…’

If he says anything else beyond that, it falls on deaf ears. Din’s been fiercely holding on to consciousness by a single, frayed thread. Knowing that Cobb is back in Mos Pelgo is what finally puts him at ease. His speeder and _beskar’gam_ are in safe hands. In the morning, there will be no prying questions from strangers, no need for explanations that he does not have the energy nor the inclination to give.

At long last, Din allows himself to fall properly, deeply, asleep.

**________________________**

He wakes at midday to the sound of voices in the adjacent room. Not last night’s mob of curious townsfolk, but what sounds like Cobb and his elderly caretaker – Grete – conversing in a language that Din, now in possession of all his faculties, still can’t rightly place. It could be Bocce, he thinks, albeit in a dialect Din has never heard before, and mixed with pidgin Weequay and Huttese.

Aware enough now to be embarrassed by his state of undress, Din reaches for the tunic Fett had loaned him, intending to pull it on over his undershirt. He instead misjudges the distance between the bed and the low table beside it, and ends up knocking his breastplate to the ground. Cobb and the old woman fall abruptly silent, and Din curses himself.

Jo, for the first time since Din has awoken, speaks: ‘I’ll put on some tea.’

‘Yeah, I think you’d better,’ says Cobb, ‘And maybe dish up some flatbread if you have any. Man’s gotta eat’ 

‘I hope you’re referring to the Mandalorian there and not yourself, marshal. This ain’t a bed-and-breakfast.’ 

Din hears rather than sees Cobb’s lopsided grin. ‘‘Course. Of _course_. I’d never stoop so low as to take advantage of your hospitality.’

There comes the sound of footsteps approaching, and Din forces himself to sit upright against his cushions, even though moving his head sends little razors of pain ricocheting about inside his skull. He’s had hangovers that were more pleasant than this. His entire body feels as if it’s covered in tongue-fur.

‘Mando,’ says Cobb, the shadow of his feet visible beneath the curtain’s hem, ‘Are you awake? Can I come in?’

Din almost laughs – it’s not as if this is his house – only for it to then occur to him: Cobb is asking for permission to look. He thinks that Din has been deprived of his helmet involuntarily. Din feels a sudden wash of guilt. He should have worn his _beskar’gam._ Should have saved the marshal any confusion or discomfort. But it’s too late for that now.

‘I’m – yes, you can come in.’

Cobb slips into the room, quickly drawing the curtains shut behind him to spare Din the bright noon sunshine. He looks the same, Din notes, though that’s hardly remarkable. It’s only been four months since they last spoke. In that time, Din has lost his ship, forsaken his religion, abandoned his child, and inherited a planet. Cobb, on the other hand, has likely just gone on being the marshal of Mos Pelgo, which doesn’t strike Din as the most eventful job in the galaxy. Not everybody’s lives are as chaotic as his.

He also looks… uncomfortable, hovering by the entryway as if afraid to fully enter the room. Fingers toying with the ragged edge of his poncho. His gaze rests on Din’s face for a scant millisecond before skittering away, suddenly very interested in the adobe floor.

‘You can look at me,’ Din says, ‘The helmet’s in my speeder. It wasn’t stolen.’ In his unease he has adopted a sharp tone that probably just sounds angry to Cobb’s ears. He tries hard to gentle his voice. ‘I’m sorry. This must be... very strange.’

‘Not as strange as I imagine it is for you,’ Cobb says, and finally cracks a smile, albeit a strained one. He does look at Din then, eyes crinkled at their corners as if he’s looking at something very bright. Din tries to ignore the way it makes his breath catch in his throat. ‘So,’ Cobb continues, ‘You’re human.’

‘Yes. I was… I was born on Aq Vetina.’

‘Not Mandalore?’ Cobb asks, frowning.

‘No, not all of us are… There are very few true _Mando’ad_ left, since the Purge.’

‘I had it in my mind that you were green with pointy ears, like the kid. Though I suppose the helmet would have had to’ve been larger.’ Cobb sobers, smile shrinking back a couple of notches. ‘Mando, I’m sorry if it’s… I hate to ask, but… is he…?’

‘He’s alive. He’s – safe.’ Din pauses, rubbing a hand over his stubble. ‘A lot has happened since we last saw each other.’

‘I can see that.’ Cobb takes a seat on the ottoman at the foot of the bed. He moves gingerly, as if Din is a wild animal who is liable to bolt. ‘Mando, buddy, when Pedge told me what had happened – when I saw you last night… You gave us all quite a scare, to say the least.’

‘I was just dehydrated,’ Din objects, ‘I rode into the desert with too little water. It was a stupid thing to do and I’m sorry if it’s put anyone at an inconvenience, but the vaporators –’

‘You weren’t dehydrated,’ Cobb interrupts, gently, ‘Well, you were, but that’s not what’s making you sick, Mando. You were having a subarachnoid haemorrhage.’

‘A subarachnoid…’

‘You were bleeding from your brain, brother. If it had gone on for much longer, Ravi – that’s our town sawbones – he says you might’ve ended up paralysed from the neck down. Or worse.’

Din feels a rush of nausea that he thinks might just be psychological this time around. ‘Will I –’

‘You’ll be just fine. Ravi got in there and performed a craniotomy quicker than a Tiss’shar signing a trade deal. Nipped that aneurysm right in the bud. But Mando –’

‘Din,’ he interrupts, roughly. Everybody else seems to know, so why not Cobb? And besides, being called _Mando_ feels disingenuous now, given how far he has strayed from the teachings of the _Resol’nare_. ‘My name is Din Djarin.’

‘Din Djarin,’ Cobb repeats, with what feels like exquisite care, as if he were handling some rare piece of pottery. ‘Din,’ he says, ‘This kind of thing doesn’t just _happen_ to a person. So, if there’s some kind of trouble following you, if you’re running from something, I’d appreciate it if you let me know. Not so I can make you leave –’ Cobb adds, registering Din’s dismay, ‘But so that me and the folks round here can get properly ready to beat the ever loving frack out of whoever did this to you.’

Din swallows around the lump that has risen in his throat. ‘It’s done,’ he says, ‘It’s finished. He’s… he won’t be troubling anyone ever again.’

‘Good,’ Cobb says, leaning forward so that his elbows rest on his knees. ‘Then that means you’ve got plenty of time to explain to me just how you wound up here.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:  
> \- A character suffers from a traumatic brain injury. Though his life is saved fairly quickly (thank you, bacta), he still suffers from a wide variety of symptoms both before and after the surgery, including: migraines, impaired vision, impaired hearing, nausea, disorientation, and muscular spasms.  
> \- Brief mention of suicidal thoughts.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- This chapter is a little longer than the first to make up for the fact that the next one might be a bit late.  
> \- Felacations are a real Star Wars species! Here's the [Wookieepedia page.](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Felacatian)  
> \- Thank you so much for your support <3

They talk for hours. Or, rather, Din talks – probably speaking more in a single sitting than he has since he was a child. Cobb listens and occasionally interjects when Din hasn’t made himself clear enough. That Grogu can move objects with his mind is something that takes a great deal of explaining. 

‘If I’d tried to fight you in the saloon that day, little sprog probably would have split my head open, huh?’

‘Probably,’ Din agrees.

Jo interrupts them with the tea-tray just as Din is recounting he and Mayfeld’s infiltration of the refinery on Morak. It takes him an embarrassingly long moment to place her as the demolition expert from the fight against the krayt dragon – everybody that day looks somewhat similar in Din’s memory: tired and dusty and covered in viscera. She is also the woman who has been caring for him alongside Grete and Dr. Ravi, for which Din thanks her, clumsily but sincerely.

‘I’m – sorry about the lamp,’ he says, gesturing to the object in question. Its shade sits slightly skewed now.

‘I don’t care about the kriffing lamp!’ Jo laughs, ‘I’m just happy that you didn’t die on me – then I really would’ve been angry. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to bury a body in sand?’

‘Jo,’ Cobb warns.

‘Though I suppose we could have just cremated you –’

‘ _Josefina_.’

‘Oh, lighten up,’ she scoffs, and, seeing Cobb’s small frown: ‘Marshal Vanth, sir.’

‘I’d still like to pay for any damage I might have done while I was… out of sorts,’ Din insists, ‘And for Dr. Ravi’s services. And for your – your hospitality.’

Jo laughs again, teeth flashing white in the gloom. ‘You must’ve hit your head harder than we thought! You do remember saving this town from a massive, rampaging monster, don’t you? Or is that an everyday occurrence in the life of a Mandalorian?’

Din suppresses a wince. ‘… That debt is already paid.’

‘By _him_ , maybe,’ Jo says, gesturing to Cobb, ‘But the rest of us folks didn’t get a chance to thank you properly before you went speeding off into the sunset. Mighty heroic and all, but a little inconvenient. Pedge had the idea to take up a collection in case you ever came back.’

‘She’s joking,’ Cobb says, catching Din’s alarmed look. ‘She does that. Some would say _too_ much.’

Jo proffers them a sardonic little salute – ‘Marshal. Mando.’ – before slipping from the room.

Cobb, reaching for the teapot, shakes his head. ‘That kid,’ he murmurs.

‘She’s – definitely got spirit.’

‘She’s bored out of her kriffin’ mind is what she is.’

Din accepts the small, earthenware cup Cobb hands him, filled with a liquid the colour of Mandalorian _papuur’gal_. It will always feel somewhat revelatory, he suspects, to eat and drink in another person’s presence. ‘Why does she stay?’ he asks.

Cobb shrugs, expansively. ‘Why do any of us? Family, money, fear.’ He gives Din a hard look, flinty. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard by now what they call us, in the larger settlements.’

Din nods. ‘Freetown.’

‘ _Freetown_ ,’ Cobb echoes, raising his cup in a mock toast. Din doesn’t think he’s ever heard him sound so bitter. ‘Fact of the matter is, most folks who live here are too scared to leave. They’ve seen first-hand what happens elsewhere. Take Jo’s grandmother –’ Here, Cobb lowers his voice, glancing over his shoulder at the curtain that separates them from the rest of the house. ‘Grete was sold to the Red Key when she was just a baby. Lost her daughter, Jo’s mother, in the silicax mines. Now, she don’t speak a lick of Basic, and she ain’t interested in learning any. Most days, it’s hard enough for Jo to get her out of the house. Old girl distrusts strangers something terrible, and for good reason, too.’

Din looks down at the battered tea set, at the patchwork blanket folded over his legs. ‘She put me up,’ he says, quietly. ‘That must have been difficult for her.’

Cobb, seeing Din’s obvious guilt, softens. ‘Yeah, well, reckon she knew you weren’t gonna do her no harm, on account of you being jibbering and unconscious an’ all. And!’ he adds, slapping Din’s calf jovially, ‘You got me to vouch for you now.’

‘She trusts you,’ Din agrees, ‘Everybody here does.’ Not for the first time, he wonders if taking the _beskar’gam_ away from Cobb was the best decision. ‘… I don’t meet a lot of people like you. Decent people, I mean.’

‘Decent!’ Cobb crows, ‘Now, no one’s ever accused me of being _that_ before…’ He’s joking, but Din can tell that the words have touched him. His smile has a slightly shaky edge to it now, happy-sad. ‘But you were telling me a story,’ he says, reaching again for Din’s leg over the blanket, but this time only grasping it, lightly.

Din feels the back of his neck flush hot. ‘I should probably drink this first,’ he says, lifting his teacup, trying hard to keep his hand steady. The moment the stuff passes his lips, he gags, nearly spitting it out in Cobb’s face. ‘ _Dank farrik!_ What is this shit?’

Cobb grins widely. ‘Oh, you don’t have H’Kak bean tea where you come from? And here I thought Mandalorian cuisine was supposed to be the finest in the galaxy.’

‘My mouth tastes like I just licked an ion battery.’

‘Hey, that’s how you know it’s working!’

**________________________**

Din’s story rambles on for so long that they both end up eating an early supper at Grete’s. Of course, the presence of his hosts necessitates a full retelling of Din’s adventures – and some complicated feats of translation on Jo’s behalf – while Cobb busies himself plating their meals and serving the drinks. It turns out to be a simple dish of Eopie brisket and flatbread, for which Din is thankful. The thought of eating anything even remotely spiced is enough to make his insides clench in fear – the H’kak bean tea alone had almost been the death of him. Although it’s vital that he keeps drinking it, Jo insists. Apparently, the plant’s got restorative properties that will help to counteract any of the lingering muscle spasms brought on by his haemorrhage.

The duplicate suns are close to setting when Din finally finishes recounting his climactic battle with Moff Gideon. Both Jo and Grete are full of questions – most of them concerning the Jedi, Luke Skywalker, who Din is surprised to learn is somewhat of a local celebrity.

Cobb, on the other hand, asks nothing, for which Din is almost absurdly grateful. Cobb, he is sure, has noticed the inconsistencies in his story, the gaps. Din had, for instance, glossed over the incident with the facial recognition scan. He’d been comfortable telling Cobb about removing his helmet in front of Grogu – that had been of his own volition, after all – but he isn’t sure if he’s ready to relive the pain and humiliation he’d experienced on Morak just yet.

Neither does he feel he can adequately explain to Cobb just how lonely he feels, how unmoored. How he considers, probably every hour, flying off to Yavin IV and retrieving Grogu from his new guardian. How he’d come to Mos Pelgo, in part, because he needed to be seen by somebody who’d known Din as he once was – as a hero, a Mandalorian, a father.

No, to tell Cobb that would be an even greater humiliation. Instead, Din acted as if he’d found himself on Tatooine purely by chance, dropped off by his new compatriots who happened to have business there. That he’d ridden out to Mos Pelgo on a whim, thinking it as good a place as any to lay low for a while.

That was what he’d said: _for a while_. He still doesn’t have a set date of departure in mind. Doesn’t even know where he’ll go when he _does_ depart.

Cobb never asks, and in return, Din doesn’t say anything about the nasty, livid-looking scar that slashes across his temple – the result of a hasty attempt to dig out a tracking chip, he’s almost certain.

‘D’you think you can walk?’ Cobb asks, once they’re finished with their meal, and Din hazards that he probably can. Together, they gather his things and half-walk, half-hobble their way over to Din’s jumpspeeder, Cobb needing to support his weight a little once they’re on the uneven sand.

Cobb politely appraises the vehicle, though he can’t quite manage to keep the smirk off of his face.

‘I’m fully aware that it’s a piece of shit,’ Din says. ‘Nobody duped me – I just rented the cheapest model I could find.’

‘How long until the lease runs out?’ Cobb asks, giving the chassis a gentle nudge with his foot. The speeder lets out an ominous sounding wheeze and drops a couple of inches, belching smoke.

‘I pried the tracking beacon off after I reached the flatlands. The agency’ll just think I got swallowed by a krayt.’

‘You’re a scoundrel, Din Djarin.’

Din finds himself oddly flustered by that. He scowls. ‘I’ll pay them what they’re due when I return to Mos Espa.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know you will. We both know how you get about your debts.’ Cobb pats the speeder’s cracked leather seat. ‘Saddle up, then.’

Din blinks. ‘I can walk,’ he insists, even though his right leg is beginning to spasm. The left one too, come to think of it.

Cobb shakes his head. ‘I live a ways out. And you oughtn’t leave this thing just lying around in the open. But, then again…’ – that smirk resurfaces, which Din finds in equal measures charming and infuriating, ‘It’s not like anyone would want to steal it.’

**________________________**

Cobb’s place is part of a modest housing complex: three residences that open out onto a sunken central courtyard. There’s a moisture farm – ‘Twenty vaporators,’ Cobb informs him, proudly – and a small garage. The place is indeed a few miles out from Mos Pelgo proper – Din can just make out the lights of the main concourse, twinkling in the distance. He’d be able to see better with his helmet’s HUD, he thinks – but then, why would he need to? There is no danger here.

The largest home is occupied by Sorrell, a salt-miner, and their partner, Margaid, who maintains the moisture farm, Cobb explains. Sorrell works the night shift and sleeps for most of the day, black-out curtains and all, so as long as Din keeps his voice down, they should both get on splendidly. Margaid is lovely, Cobb adds, and makes excellent zucca fruit pastries, if Din ever finds himself getting peckish.

The home between theirs and Cobb’s is empty for the time being, its owner having married and shacked up with his wife’s family back in Mos Pelgo. It’s markedly smaller than the other two homes – just a one-room semi-basement with a kitchenette and an en suite. The owner has left their mattress behind in the sleeping alcove, along with some sparse pieces of furniture, all of which Din is apparently welcome to.

‘There’s no running water, and the AC’s busted, so you’ll have to camp out at my place during the day, unless you feel like roasting.’ Cobb scratches at the back of his neck, looking sheepish. ‘I’m sorry if it’s too – basic. We can fix it up, if you really are planning on sticking around.’

Din thanks him, quietly. He wants desperately to explain – that these are the most lavish living quarters he’s ever been provided with. That in the covert, growing up, they’d slept in three-tiered bunk beds, twelve to a room. That even in the sparse, muddled recollections of his childhood, he can remember having to share a sleeping pallet with his parents. But the words – vulnerable, intimate – lodge in his throat. Instead, he just assures Cobb yet again that he’ll work for his keep. That he’ll find a job just as soon as he’s recovered enough to walk without limping.

‘Oh yeah! That reminds me…’ Cobb digs around beneath his poncho, eventually retrieving a sizeable foil blister pack. ‘Ravi says to take one of these thrice daily – apologizes, as they’ll probably ruin your appetite for the first week or so. He hasn’t quite worked out all the kinks.’

‘What are they?’ Din asks, peering at the rows of tiny orange capsules.

‘Little cocktail he whipped up for some of the miners. It’s just an ACE inhibitor paired with some medium-grade muscle relaxants – both should help with the spasms. And you can mix it in with your symoxin no problem.’ When Din remains silent, Cobb presses the pack more firmly into his hand, folding Din’s gloved fingers around it with a gentle insistence. ‘It’s alright,’ he says, ‘I wouldn’t let you take anything I haven’t tried myself. And Ravi is a good doctor – used to work in a fancy hospital on Coruscant, before the Empire took over.’

‘I’m not used to –’ Din stumbles over his words, ‘Usually I just slap on a bacta patch and… and get on with it.’

‘Uh huh. And how’s that been working out for you?’ Cobb asks, raising an eyebrow.

Din, defeated, places the blister pack in his duffel-bag alongside the rest of his things.

‘Right,’ Cobb says, clapping his hands together. A nervous tic, Din suspects. ‘Sonic unit’s through that doorway – indulge for as long as you want, the stuff’s all solar-powered anyway. Now, I gotta head off bright and early tomorrow morning, so if you want the pleasure of my company over breakfast, you’ll have to be up before sunrise. If not, I’ll leave some stuff out for you in the kitchen.’

Din thanks him, feeling a little like a broken record.

At the top of the stairs, Cobb pauses. ‘Oh,’ he says, slyly, ‘and don’t think I forgot about Jo’s special tea. Two cups a day, morning and evening. And I’ve counted how many bags she gave me, so I’ll know if you’re shirking.’

‘Goodnight marshal.’

‘Goodnight Din.’

**________________________**

Once he’s alone, the first thing Din does is switch on all of the lights. Logically, he knows that there is nothing waiting for him in the shadows, but neither can he quite bring himself to let down his guard in this strange, empty house. With an intensity that catches him by surprise, he realizes that he misses the _Razor Crest_ – misses her cramped cockpit; the worn leather pilot’s seat with the broken armrest; the cargo bay he could never fully stand upright in. Absurdly, he even misses his sleeping capsule, which was brutally uncomfortable and barely larger than a coffin. He’d liked to lay on his back and watch Grogu’s hammock swaying from side-to-side above him.

Grogu. Din finds himself missing him more frequently during the evenings, once the day’s business has been concluded and there is nothing left to distract him from his thoughts. They’d had a routine developed. First dinner, then a wash – which, after eating, was almost always needed. Din usually had to resort to using a saucer of warm water and a flannel – the kid had a fierce aversion to bathing, or perhaps just to water in general. Din didn’t know enough about his species to speculate as to why.

After that, it was time for a story. This part of their routine had been born out of necessity – Grogu took a long time to go down, and if Din left, he’d simply be up in the cockpit five minutes later. So Din had begun reciting the same stories he’d been read as a young oblate: long, ponderous tales of ancient _Mando’ad_ Crusaders and their wily foes, the _Jetiise_ – more epic poems that children’s stories, and indeed, many of them had been lifted from the _Qel-Droma_ cycle. After meeting Ahsoka, Din had wondered whether or not telling Grogu these stories, in which the Jedi were so often painted as villains, was a wise idea. Just how much of it would he remember?

In the end, Din had abandoned this line of thought. Grogu seemed to enjoy hearing about dual-bladed lightsabers and Basilisk war droids, and at least Din wasn’t obligated to do any funny voices.

It had never occurred to him to be embarrassed by any of this domesticity, though doubtless Xi’an and the rest of her lot would have laughed to see him behave in such a way. In Din’s mind, it was done out of love, and so it was right. If the _Kyr’tsad_ had instilled in him one gentle instinct – a sliver of tenderness buried amidst all of the violence – it was that children were never to be shunned.

Now, he has nobody to care for but himself.

At a loss for what to do, Din unpacks and cleans his _beskar’gam,_ which serves to settle his thoughts somewhat. He arranges it in figure-form on the carpet, decides immediately that that looks too funereal, and ends up packing it all away in a small closet area. Dutifully, he swallows one of Dr. Ravi’s capsules, and goes to use the refresher. 

As always, he strips quickly and mechanically, taking special care not to look in the mirror. His torso is a multi-coloured patchwork of bruises – some greenish-yellow and healing, others still purple and raw from where they’d been chafing against his breastplate.

When he unwraps his bandages, he’s dismayed to discover a patch of shorn hair behind his ear, and beneath that, a tight little bundle of dissolvable sutures. If he were showering with real water, he’d try to keep his head dry, but Din figures the worst the sonic can do is further sterilize the wound. He turns the frequency dial to its highest setting – _debride –_ which is about as clean as a person can get without completely scouring away their epidermis.

Half-an-hour later, when he steps out of the refresher, he finds a small pile of clothes, along with some pillows and bedlinen, stacked beside the sleeping alcove. It only takes a glance to see that they belong to Cobb – a lot of red, a lot of fun patterns. On a subconscious level, it registers with Din that he should be concerned. That somebody was able to sneak in and out of the studio without him hearing suggests an inexcusable lapse in awareness. However, clean and warm and well-fed for the first time in weeks, he can’t quite bring himself to care. Pulling on the first set of underclothes he can find, Din doesn’t even bother to make the bed. He just wraps himself in one of the blankets Cobb has supplied, and is sound asleep before his head even hits the pillow.

**________________________**

He’s out for a total of fourteen hours. Usually, Din’s internal clock will wake him up just before dawn, or whatever passes for it in deep space. Instead, it’s the white-hot glare of Tatooine’s twin suns that rouses him, streaming in from the semi-basement’s small window. Judging from their position in the sky, it’s almost noon. It’s so hot in the studio that simply getting out of bed feels like wading through molasses.

Din quickly grabs some suitable day clothes from the pile by his bed, pockets his capsules and, after a moment’s hesitation, his blaster, before making his way up the stairs.

Stepping out the front door, he almost collides with somebody as they pass him by. The figure – female – hisses like a snake, jumping about a foot in the air. Din gets the vague impression of slit pupils suddenly widening into saucers. 

‘Oh, kriff!’ the woman exclaims, clutching a hand to her chest, ‘ _Kriffing_ kriff!’ She sucks in a deep breath, steadying herself. Small white fangs peek over her lower lip. ‘I shouldn’t have – I’m _so_ sorry for hissing, but you scared me! I didn’t think anybody had bought this unit.’

Din blinks, caught momentarily off guard. He has never seen a polymorphic feline before – assuming that’s even what she is. Din knows that some women will pay a handsome sum for similar cosmetic modifications. She’s very small, her head only coming up to Din’s shoulders, and possessed of a lithe, wiry strength that reminds him of Fennec Shand. She’s covered head-to-toe in short, sandy-coloured fur, faintly speckled and only a shade lighter than her mass of curly blonde hair. Din is fascinated to see a tail peeping out from beneath the hem of her dress. 

‘You ain’t never seen a Felacation before, have you?’ the woman guesses, regarding him wryly. Her pupils have returned to their usual apple-seed slits.

‘I, uh – no,’ Din admits.

‘It’s alright. Everybody stares at first. It’s a little like seeing a loth-cat walking around on its hindlegs.’ The woman extends a paw. ‘I’m Margaid.’

Din grasps it in his own. It’s furry and padded, though thankfully not clawed. ‘Din Djarin – and, I don’t own this unit. I’m just staying here for a while.’

‘Uh huh.’ Margaid looks him up and down, smirking a little, and for the first time Din realizes that he’s barefooted, dressed in boxer shorts and a tank top. _Cobb’s_ boxer shorts and tank top.

‘I didn’t… That is to say, these were…’ Din doesn’t think he’s blushed this red since he was an oblate. ‘I’m – a friend, of the marshal’s.’

‘Yuh-huh, that’s what I thought,’ Margaid says, making a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a purr. ‘You’re _just_ his type.’

‘Oh,’ Din sputters, trying not to think too hard about that. ‘Oh, no. Not – not that kind of friend.’

Margaid laughs, her incisors bared. ‘I’m just messin’ with you, honey.’ She bats him lightly on the shoulder. ‘You have _got_ to work on your poker-face though – you looked like you were about to shit a brick!’

She steps back, the full brunt of her attention sliding off of him. Din is embarrassed by the substantial degree of relief he feels. _Now I know what it’s like to be a mouse,_ he thinks.

‘Well, I live in the next unit over,’ Margaid says, gesturing with a paw. ‘You’re hungry or you need some water, you just knock, okay? Quietly though, mind. Sorrell’s asleep and they value their beauty rest even more than I do – which, well. If you knew about Felacations, you’d know how funny that is.’

‘I think I get it,’ Din says.

Margaid smiles winsomely, whiskers twitching. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Din Djarin.’

‘Likewise.’

She sashays off, tail whipping lazily back and forth. Din watches her go, bemused. Probably, if he was still a teenager, he’d be head-over-heels in love with her already. He’d had a thing for the tough, fiery ones back then – it was what had initially drawn him to Xi’an, before he’d realized that she wasn’t actually either of those things, just volatile and prone to acts of cruelty. But he’s an old man now, by Mandalorian standards, and his yearnings are a great deal more mundane. All he wants now is somebody he can trust. For somebody to look upon whole of him and to not turn their face away in fear or disgust.

He keys open Cobb’s door using the password scrawled beside the pad – Mos Pelgo is that kind of neighbourhood – and lets himself into the unit. Immediately, a wall of cold air envelopes him, and Din murmurs a quiet blessing to _Mand’alor_ that Cobb had been considerate enough to leave the AC system running.

Blinking in the semi-darkness, he takes stock of his surroundings. Structurally, the central living space isn’t so different from that in Din’s studio: a vaguely oblong room consisting of a sitting area and a small kitchen. Cobb has a dining table, though, alongside a couch and a very lived-in looking armchair. A staircase on the left leads down to what Din can only assume is the master bedroom, while a small door built into the far wall must open out onto the refresher.

The whole place is built predominantly above ground, with windows made from heat-reflective paristeel. Din throws open the curtains, needing to see properly but also enjoying the sunlight, now that it isn’t actively trying to burn him to a crisp. More details of Cobb’s unit become apparent – like the small wicker shelf opposite the couch, stocked to the brim with holovids and, Din is surprised to note, a handful of genuine printed books. On the kitchen sill, there’s a trio of succulent plants growing in brightly painted clay pots – ‘Arbor, 8,’ ‘Carina, 11,’ and ‘Mica, 7’ read the inscriptions. Relatives of Cobb’s, maybe – but then, Din has never heard him mention family. Local school children, more likely, expressing their appreciation for the town marshal.

When Din spots the macramé wall-hanging mounted by the entryway, he’s especially pleased to discover that it’s Tusken-made. _Cobb must be upholding his end of the truce,_ Din thinks, though he’d known all along that he that would.

Looking at the Tusken craftwork stirs something in his memory, though it shies away from him the moment that he tries to grasp it. Mildly irked, Din makes his way to the refresher, in desperate need of another sonic after waking up that morning drenched in sweat. 

**________________________**

He spends the rest of the day pottering around Cobb’s home, mind-numbingly bored. He’d like to ride into town, to thank Dr. Ravi and to apologise to Pedge for passing out in the saloon, but he knows he’s still too unwell to risk braving the heat. Instead, he takes another long sonic, opting this time for the deep-tissue massage mode – aware the whole time that he shouldn’t be growing accustomed to such luxuries. Afterwards, he makes himself a late breakfast from the supplies that Cobb has left him and, at around four o’clock, lunch, even though Dr. Ravi was speaking the truth – his appetite is completely gone. He even forces himself to choke down another cup of Jo’s revolting H’kak bean tea, reasoning that the ordeal will at least break up the monotony of the day.

It would be easier if he could snoop – something that Din desperately wants to do, but holds back from. There’s nothing he hates more than people invading his privacy, so he should extend to Cobb the same level of consideration he’d like extended to him. He settles for sifting through Cobb’s collection of holovids, which are on display and up for grabs. They’re mostly just old recordings of the Boonta Eve Podrace, alongside some so-bad-it’s-good, straight-to-HoloNet action flicks with names like _Cataclysm Prism 4_ and _Crimson Empire III._ Din is mildly amused to find some romantic dramas nestled in beside all the macho posturing: _Love is Waiting, Passion Taboo, Easy Spacer._ According to the holoprojector, these are, incidentally, the vids that Cobb has logged the highest number of times.

Eventually, Din manages to locate a Season 4 boxset of _The Robot’s Mistress,_ which he cues up if only to break the silence. It’s terrible. Despite there being an opening scrawl at the beginning of every episode, Din fails to grasp any semblance of the plot – some convoluted romance between a beautiful Galactic-senator-cum-warrior-princess and her lover, whose consciousness has been uploaded into a synthetic body following a terrible accident. One thing Din is certain of is that the show’s leading lady, Jenny Starpepper, has never actually been trained for proper combat. He doesn’t even think she’s wearing a bra.

He’s up to Episode 16: _The Moon Whisperer_ when Cobb finally returns. Half-dozing, Din jolts suddenly into action at the sound of the key turning in the lock. He scrambles to turn off the holoprojector, but not before Cobb gets a good long look at what he was watching.

‘Whoa there! Now that’s a throwback!’ he exclaims, grinning fondly at the menu screen. ‘Pre-Empire, if I’m not mistaken. Didn’t have you pegged as a fan of vintage cinema.’

‘I’m not,’ Din protests. Vehemently. ‘Or, at least, now I _know_ I’m not. That was awful.’

Cobb chuckles quietly, hanging up his rifle and blaster. ‘Really? I thought you would have dug it. Especially that Robot character – strong silent type in a metal helmet seemed right up your alley.’

‘He was the worst. Nobody speaks that way – all that ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ kriff.’

‘Ah, it’s not so bad. Just gotta try not to take it too seriously.’ Cobb pauses briefly midway through shrugging off his jacket, suppressing a wince. Din narrows his eyes.

‘Are you injured?’

‘Hm? Oh, no.’ Cobb smiles, waving him off. ‘Old bones is all. I’ll be fine.’

But he’s not – fine. Din watches him carefully as he unties his boots, removes and packs away the sparse plastoid armour he now wears in place of _beskar’gam._ He puts on a good show, for sure – humming to himself, ambling jauntily around the unit – but Din, well-versed in disguising his own discomfort, can tell that it’s only a farce enacted for his own benefit.

Cobb’s always been on the slim side. After their fight with the krayt dragon, Din had been a little shocked – both to see him giving up Fett’s armour so willingly, and at the subtle stirring of attraction he’d felt upon seeing those narrow hips, that trim waist. Now, however, he looks _underfed,_ his clothes hanging off of him where once they fit snugly. There are harsh new lines about his eyes and mouth, and sometimes, when he thinks himself unobserved, Din will catch him scowling off into the middle distance, as if trying to puzzle out a difficult equation.

Either being the marshal of Mos Pelgo is more trying than Din had initially assumed, or something particularly unpleasant is going on.

He resolves not to pry, however – he doubts Cobb wants to bring his work home with him, and if he really wants to discuss it with Din, he will. Instead, he just hovers awkwardly at the kitchen counter while Cobb prepares dinner for them both. ‘Just leftovers, I’m afraid,’ he apologises, retrieving a saucepan of stock from the refrigeration unit. Leftovers or not, it still smells amazing as it burbles away atop the stove. Din can’t help but feel a little inadequate. He’s never cooked a meal in his life – unless dehydrating vacuum-sealed rations aboard the _Crest_ counted as cooking.

Cobb watches, hands on his hips, as Din takes his third pill of the day. He is then rewarded with an ice-cold beer, which Cobb presents to him a little dubiously.

‘You guys _are_ allowed to drink alcohol, right?’

Din snorts. ‘We’re not monks.’ He uncaps the bottle with his teeth and takes a long swig.

Cobb watches on, looking impressed. ‘Can I ask a question?’ he says, in a tone that Din is all too familiar with.

_Here we go,_ he thinks, grimly. They’d had a good run, all things considered. Usually people kicked off their insulting little interrogations as soon as they were introduced – Cobb had at least waited a few days before getting nosy.

‘Yes, we can drink and fuck,’ Din explains, pre-emptively. ‘There aren’t any specific rules regarding drugs but anything excessive is generally frowned upon. Same goes for gambling. A Mandalorian can take their armour off, but only in private. They don’t shower in their helmets and they don’t sleep in them either, unless it’s unavoidable – which it often is.’ 

Cobb rests his chin in his hand, peering at Din with a kind of friendly scrutiny. ‘Now, why d’you suppose that’s what I was going to ask?’ he says, softly.

Din shrugs, unable to hold his gaze. ‘It’s what everyone asks.’

‘Well, I might just surprise you,’ he says, laying a hand on Din’s forearm and squeezing gently. That’s another thing he will never get used to: being touched in this way, thoughtlessly and without fear. ‘It’s about your helmet, Din.’

Din swallows roughly, mouth suddenly dry. ‘What about it?’

Cobb grips his arm a little more firmly, seemingly for his own comfort as much as for Din’s. It’s strange, seeing somebody so confident rendered suddenly self-conscious. ‘You can… You can put it back on, if you want,’ he says, very carefully, ‘Nobody will be offended. _I_ won’t be… I wouldn’t take it as an insult, is what I’m saying. If you didn’t want me to see your face.’

Din opens and shuts his mouth, at a loss for words.

‘Only, I can tell that you’re uncomfortable,’ Cobb continues, powering through the awkwardness, worried now that he’s said the wrong thing. ‘I would be too, if I’d gone that long without showing my face to nobody.’

Din, feeling slightly hysterical, has to restrain himself from laughing. As it happens, Cobb is the _only_ person – save Grogu – that Din _doesn’t_ feel uncomfortable to have looking at him. But how to explain that in a way that doesn’t leave the tender core of him laid out in the open, utterly vulnerable?

‘You don’t – you don’t gotta prove anything to me or to anybody else by keeping it off. You can put it back on and we can make like I never saw anything.’

Din finally finds it within himself to speak. He tells Cobb the same thing he told Shand. That too many people have seen. That he’d broken his vows of his own volition.

‘Can’t you just take them again?’ Cobb asks, earnestly.

Din shakes his head. ‘It’s not that easy.’

He tries to explain. That he is not only a failure in the eyes of his clan, a deserter, but that he is also _Dar’manda:_ no longer a Mandalorian. It’s a concept that has plagued translators for hundreds of years – a kind of anti-state-of-being that’s unquantifiable in Galactic Basic. The closest equivalent term Din can think of is ‘traitor,’ but then, they have a different word in _Mando’a_ for that. A traitor may still follow the Six Tenets of the _Resol’nare._ Din, on the other hand, has not only betrayed but _apostatized_. Everything he’s achieved – almost forty years of discipline and sacrifice in dedication to the cause – is now considered forfeit, an empty promise made by somebody who was always destined to transgress. Traitors are put on trial. Those who are _Dar’manda_ are lucky if they are not shot on sight.

Cobb listens to Din’s faltering explanation patiently, attentively, and with a growing look of sadness.

‘How old were you when you took your vows?’ he asks, quietly, once Din is finished.

‘I’ve never known my exact age. But I was around twelve, I think.’

‘Just a kid,’ Cobb murmurs, shaking his head.

Hearing those words, spoken so bitterly, Din feels that old defensiveness rear its head – that fondness for the people who raised him. ‘They didn’t force me. Foundlings who did not want to live as Mandalorians were given placements elsewhere, with good families.’

‘Attractive idea, though, for an orphan. To be a part of a group. To be able to protect yourself. I know I felt powerful, wearing that armour. And I can remember well enough what it feels like to be young, and angry. And alone.’ Cobb thumbs at the scar on his temple, and Din can’t stop himself from asking.

‘Slavers?’

Cobb, seeing where he’s looking, lowers his hand. Something in his gaze shutters. ‘Same lot that took Grete, yeah.’ 

‘And your parents?’ Din asks, though he already knows the answer. Orphans can spot other orphans from a mile away.

Cobb pulls a face that is somewhere between a smile and a grimace. ‘Let’s not, shall we? That there’s a sad story, and you don’t need to be hearing one of those tonight.’ He claps his hands together. _Definitely_ a nervous tic, Din decides. ‘Now, how about I serve us up some grub, hm?’

Din assents without any objections.

**________________________**

Dinner turns out to be womp rat stew – or _mystery stew_ , as Cobb dubs it – with slices of Haroun bread to mop up the dregs.

‘It’s a bona fide hangover cure,’ Cobb informs him, ladling a sizable portion of the stuff into Din’s bowl.

‘But I’m not hungover.’ 

‘No, but you sure as hell look like you are.’

Din dutifully eats what little he can manage. His lack of appetite from earlier has been replaced by a kind of constant, low-level nausea. The cold beer helps, though Cobb cuts him off after two bottles – ‘This look like a bar to you?’

It’s easier, Din reflects, having somebody to keep him in check. He’s not a reckless person by nature, but he can be single-minded. These past few months, looking after Grogu, returning him to his people, had taken absolute precedent. Now that he’s finally been given the space to breathe, it’s become abundantly clear to Din just how poorly he’s been tending to his own needs. It’s nice to have somebody look after _him_ for a change.

Nice – but untenable. Cobb is his own person. He doesn’t exist for Din to offload his emotional baggage onto. The sooner he isn’t dependant on the marshal for room and board, the better.

‘I ran into Margaid earlier.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Cobb says, grinning against the rim of his beer bottle. ‘She try to take a bite out of you?’

‘I seem to remember you describing her as lovely _._ ’

‘Aw, she is. Really. She can just be a tad – _intense_ , for some people.’ Cobb skewers a forkful of mystery meat, eyeing it thoughtfully. ‘And she gets lonely out here,’ he adds.

‘She doesn’t have a job in Mos Pelgo?’

‘No, she just tends to the moisture farm. The people in town, they’re a little… scared of her, I guess. There’s a reason you don’t see Felacations that often, ‘cept on their home world.’

Din waits, patiently, for Cobb to elaborate – which he eventually does, though not without a measure of reluctance. Din gets the impression that Cobb doesn’t like talking about people behind their backs.

‘When she and Sorrell first got hitched, there was some… contention. They’d brought her back with them from Mos Eisley, and folks round here – myself included – well. We were expecting a human girl, see?’ Cobb winces, swallowing a mouthful of stew before continuing. ‘Now, I myself ain’t got no quarrel with off-worlders. So long as you’re not out to hurt nobody and aren’t a total bishwag, you’re alright by my books. Some of the guys in town, though… Well, after years enslaved to one syndicate or another, they’re a little suspicious of anyone who’s not Tatooine born-and-bred. Pedge, they’re alright with – Weequays ain’t so different from you or me. And Ravi is basically a saint round these parts. But a Felacation…’ Cobb grimaces. ‘Let’s just say, when Margaid gets angry enough, she can change – _dramatically_. No more sweet little pussycat.’

‘She hurt anyone?’ Din asks. Margaid is bold, but she doesn’t strike him as malicious.

Cobb shakes his head. ‘No, ‘course not. I’d’ve had to lay down the law in that case, no matter my own thoughts on the matter. But she keeps to herself. Sorrell, too – they don’t like how the other townsfolk talk about her.’

There’s a moment of fraught silence, filled only by the clink and scrape of cutlery. When Din reaches for the bread knife, intending to cut himself another slice of Haroun, Cobb is prompted into action.

‘They’re… They’re good people, Din,’ he says, sounding a little strangled, ‘I don’t want you to think that they’re… That they’re not.’

Din shakes his head. _Of course not._

‘But they’re scared, like I said. And most of’m have got a pretty narrow view on things, on account of never having been off-world.’

‘Have _you?_ ’

‘Hm?’ Cobb blinks at him, then smiles. ‘Oh. No. Couldn’t, as a young man, and now that I’m older there don’t seem to be much call for it. Both my feet are planted firmly on the ground, thank you very much.’ 

‘There isn’t anywhere you’d like to go?’ Din asks, perhaps a little too eagerly.

Cobb’s smile widens into a grin – the kind that makes his eyes crinkle up at their corners. ‘You asking me on a date, Din Djarin? Gonna take me to see the Hanging Gardens of Naboo? Scuba-dive together on Glee Anselm?’

Din sputters for a moment and then scowls, stabbing resolutely at his stew. Cobb hoots.

‘Whoa there – look at that blush! No wonder you liked wearing a helmet!’ 

**________________________**

Din’s days take on a comforting monotony from that point onward. He sleeps a lot, that first week, eyes constantly drooping shut despite his best efforts to stay awake. A lifetime’s worth of all-nighters catching up with him in one fell swoop, he supposes. His internal clock does eventually right itself, however, and by week two he is able to rise in time to eat an early breakfast with Cobb – who, that first morning, takes great pleasure in presenting Din with a hardboiled egg the size of a child’s skull.

‘What _laid_ this?’ he demands, prodding at the shell – which is blue and perfectly spherical.

‘That there would be a massiff egg.’ Din crinkles his nose. ‘Now, don’t knock it before you’ve tried it,’ Cobb interjects, defensively, ‘It’s no different from one what came out of a bird, when you really get down to it. And they’ve got way more protein in ‘em on account of massiffs eating so much meat – a little tip we picked up from our new Tusken buddies.’

‘How’s it going with them?’

‘Oh, fine,’ Cobb says, breezily. ‘You’ve seen my wall art.’

Din still isn’t entirely sold on the egg. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘Some of that protein probably comes from them eating people.’

‘Bit early in the mornin’ to be tackling that kind of moral quandary, ain’t it?’ 

During the day, Din helps Margaid tend to the moisture farm. At first, he’d been suspicious of this offer of work, thinking it a favour she owed to Cobb. But Margaid had explained that the vaporators were in constant need of repair, on account of the sandstorms and the shifting soil, and she’d been looking to hire outside help before Din had arrived. She could pay him out of her partner Sorrell’s mining wages – a very sparse amount, but enough to cover rent on the studio. The money would in turn go to Cobb, Margaid added, who owned the entire property.

Din had been surprised by this – the marshal didn’t seem like the landlord type.

‘Well,’ Margaid sniffed, ‘It’s not as if there’s any sort of local council who can pay him for what he does. Everybody’s owing everybody out here. And Cobb doesn’t care if the rent’s three week’s late.’

So, Din works on the farm. Sometimes Sorrell joins them, if they can drag themselves out of bed, though they mostly just sit and poke fun. Sorrell is missing three fingers on their left hand, and has horrific, twisted burn marks that extended like evening gloves up to their elbows – the result of a methane fire which had ignited in the mine they dug for. Almost everybody in Mos Pelgo has an injury like that. Din, who knows what it’s like to be stared at, tries not to let his gaze linger for too long.

The rest of the afternoon is usually chipping away at one of Cobb’s rare paper novels – a sprawling, historical epic about an aristocrat who turns to smuggling. He’s long since given up on the holodramas.

Then, around sundown, Cobb will return home and make them both supper. Din had tried stubbornly to help, the first few times, but quickly discovered that he had no great aptitude for chopping vegetables – ‘If I wanted beets in the salad, Din, I’d’ve put them in the salad. Now go patch yourself up, for kriff’s sake.’

Afterwards, they drink beer in the courtyard and shoot the shit. They’d tried to play sabacc a couple of times, but Cobb had always won due to Din’s face being far too easy to read. They’d then switched to Desert Draw, which, conversely, Din’s superior reflexes made nigh-on-impossible for _Cobb_ to win, before they’d finally settled on pazaak, which was completely chance-based and thus fair to both of them.

At around eleven o’clock, they both say their goodnights and retreat into their respective abodes. Sometimes, Cobb will linger a while, rambling on about this or that, leaning easy and loose-limbed against Din’s doorjamb.

After the second or third time, it occurs to him that Cobb is perhaps waiting for Din to invite him in – that he’s angling for it. The thought makes Din stop dead in his tracks in the middle of the living-room, hands twitching abortively at his sides, skin prickling all over in a way that isn’t entirely unpleasant. He remembers, though he has tried to hard to blot it out, what Margaid had said to him the day they met – about him being Cobb’s type.

What exactly had she meant by that? That Cobb liked men – that was obvious. That he liked men who looked like _Din?_ Din hasn’t studied himself in the mirror for long enough to know what his assets are, what people might be attracted to. ‘Big, sad eyes – like a porg!’ Margaid had laughed one day – but Din isn’t entirely sure if she’d meant that as a compliment.

His type or not, Cobb never expresses any interest in him outright – and there is no more flirting, as there had been at their first dinner. Perhaps he had mistaken Din’s embarrassment for rejection. Din resolves not to say anything. His outlook on the future – on life in general – is complicated enough already. He doesn’t need to be introducing some misbegotten romance into the mix, no matter how often he finds himself wanting to lean across the dining table, grab Cobb by the shirt-front and – well. Din doesn’t let himself imagine any further than that.

He continues to exist in this manner for three weeks, and, while not quite happy, he finds that he’s calmer than he has been in years. He has a job to do, a place to sleep, and, though he still finds himself dwelling on the matter of his creed, the pain and confusion – the feeling of being _dislocated_ from himself – has faded to a dull ache. When he thinks about Grogu, he tries to do so sparingly, and, to the best of his abilities, without remorse. _The hard thing, but the right thing,_ he reminds himself, though it is Fennec Shand’s voice that he hears. 

Then, late one evening during Din’s fourth week on Tatooine, Mos Pelgo comes under attack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:  
> \- A character is still recovering from a brain injury, and experiences slight muscle spasms. They take medication in order to combat this, the side-effects of which include a lack of appetite and low-level feelings of nausea.  
> \- Brief mention of stitches.  
> \- A character describes being raised in a very strict, religious environment.  
> \- Canon-typical references to slavery.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Hi everyone! Sorry that this update was quite delayed - mental illness has been kicking my ass the last couple of weeks 🙄 But I'm really happy with this chapter, and I hope you will be too. Thank you so much for sticking with this story!! 😊💛

It takes him a moment to properly register the knocking on his door. Half-asleep, Din at first mistakes it for some persistent remnant of a dream. He’s been doing that a lot since he arrived in Mos Pelgo – dreaming. Used to be he could just pass out in his pilot’s seat or sleeping capsule and be greeted with nothing but white noise. Now he dreams of an empty pile of helmets, so tall it seems to blot out the sun. Of being back on Tython, watching, helplessly, as Gideon’s Dark Troopers swarm the Seeing Stone.

Or, like tonight, he’ll jolt awake feeling hollow and tearful, as if he has been gutted, and know that he’d been dreaming about the day his parents were murdered. This time, however, the noise doesn’t fade away as it usually does – it only takes on a different timbre. Not the thundering footsteps of an approaching battle droid, but somebody pounding on his door. Not his mother shouting his name but another woman, somebody younger. Margaid.

‘Dank farrik, Din, open up! It’s an emergency!’

Din, scrambling to his feet, takes all of two steps before he trips, legs still tangled up in his bedsheets, and cracks his chin against the side table. Margaid must hear the crash from outside because she falls silent, confident that she’s woken him. Cursing, Din kicks himself free and, ignoring the pain lancing through the lower half of his face, pulls on yesterday’s discarded pants and one of Cobb’s numerous ponchos. His blaster he stuffs down the back of his waistband, not wanting to frighten anybody.

He takes the stairs three at a time and quickly keys open the door. Margaid is still out there waiting for him, a cardigan thrown on over her nightgown. Her ears are pinned right back against her head, her pupils blown. 

‘Oh good, you’re awake,’ she snaps, taking him by the hand, ‘Follow me.’ Din realizes he’d been mistaken, the first time they met – she does have claws. Claws that are currently digging painfully into the meat of his palm.

‘What’s going on?’ he demands, stumbling a little as Margaid leads him up the central stairway. ‘Is it Sorrell? Cobb?’ His mind is rife with grim possibilities – an explosion at one of the mines, another krayt dragon, an Imperial platoon come searching for Gideon’s darksaber.

To all of this, Margaid shakes her head, blonde curls bouncing. ‘Kriffing _Sand People_ ,’ she snarls, bearing her fangs, ‘Mudscuffers are attacking the town. Cobb’s getting his speeder ready.’

And, sure enough, if Din strains his hearing, he can just about make out the tell-tale crack of blaster-fire. He pauses, despite Margaid’s best efforts to drag him bodily up the stairs. Of course! That’s what he’d forgotten, amidst the confusion of his haemorrhage, and, after that, the strangeness of being sedentary for the first time in years, of being safe. That, and the complicated snarl of emotions he’d simply filed under _Cobb Vanth._

 _Lawlessness,_ the Aqualish had said – the one who’d rented Din his speeder. _Sand People. Some kind of turf war._

‘My armour –’ he begins. 

‘Not now,’ Margaid grunts, pulling him along.

Cobb’s speeder is already prepped by the time he and Margaid arrive at the garage. Cobb himself is suiting up, a bandoleer of what looks like stun grenades slung across his chest.

‘Din!’ he crows, pleasantly, ‘Nice of you to join us. I take it Margaid’s briefed you on the situation.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’ Din glances over his shoulder at Mos Pelgo, brighter on the horizon than it usually is on account of what looks like a large chemical blaze. The sound of blaster fire is unmistakable now, accompanied every few moments by the resounding crack of a cycler rifle. ‘What the hell is going on, Cobb? I thought you said you and the Tuskens –’

‘Different Tuskens,’ Cobb grunts, snapping a shin-guard into place, ‘I’ll explain later.’

Din feels a lurch of heart-in-mouth worry as he registers the scarcity of Cobb’s armour. No pauldrons, no thigh-guards; a breastplate that does nothing to protect the stretch of his stomach, the small of his back. That’s where Din would shoot him, if he were the enemy – it would sever the spinal column, causing instant, flaccid paralysis; no chance of Cobb squeezing the trigger of his own weapon in reflex. Din quickly abandons that line of thought, feeling sick.

He’s got a helmet, at least – lifted off of some dead sandtrooper and given a spanking new paintjob. Though Din has his doubts about whether or not red lacquer and plastoid can withstand a shot from a Tusken cycler rifle. Boba’s _beskar’gam_ could have, despite its advanced age. And Din’s certainly could.

 _Take it,_ he wants to say. _Take my armour._ Only thirty-three years of ingrained protocol stops him from opening his mouth.

‘I’ll go suit up,’ he mutters, instead, and turns to leave.

‘Uh, no, Din – you’ll be staying here,’ Cobb says, in a tone that brooks no argument. ‘Sorrell’s still at the mine, and someone needs to look after Margaid.’

‘Margaid?’ Din repeats, dumbfounded, ‘But she –’

‘ _Is all alone out here_ ,’ Cobb interrupts.

Margaid, for once, has nothing to stay. She stands with her arms wrapped around herself, gaze rooted steadfastly to the ground. She looks ashamed.

‘Din,’ Cobb says, fiercely. He reaches up, grasping Din’s face firmly in both his hands. The contact alone is enough to stifle any further protestations. ‘Mos Pelgo is my town, and I love it dearly, which is why I’m going to go fight for it. But this here –’ he inclines his head towards the housing complex, ‘— is my _home_. And I’d like for it to still be standing when I get back. Y’think you can help deliver on that?’

‘I can try,’ Din says. Really, he’d agree to just about anything if it meant that Cobb would keep on touching, cupping Din’s face in his dry, calloused hands, thumbs pressed firm against his cheekbones. If it meant he’d keep looking at Din like that a moment longer, intense and unwavering, as if the rest of the world has simply fallen away. ‘I – I’ll try.’

‘Good man,’ Cobb says, grinning, and just like that, the spell is broken. He pats him lightly on the cheek.

‘Marshal,’ Margaid murmurs, sounding fretful, ‘You don’t think that Sorrell…’

Cobb’s grin fades, and he folds her paw gently between both his hands. ‘No, hon, I don’t,’ he says, soberly. ‘This is between us and the Tuskens – and they ain’t got no bone to pick with the mining corp. Sorrell’s probably in the safest place they can be right now.’

That appears to mollify Margaid somewhat. She and Din back off a little, shirt collars pressed to the lower half of their faces as Cobb’s speeder churns up a cloud of dust. ‘If I’m not back by sunup,’ he calls, voice muffled from behind his helmet, ‘Ride into town – but _only_ then. That’s a lot of open desert out there, and they’ll be keen to pick off stragglers.’

Din raises his hand in acknowledgement, as does Margaid. Cobb taps out a two-fingered salute against his visor, guns the engine, and speeds off into the darkness.

**________________________**

He and Margaid take turns patrolling the moisture farm – Din with his blaster, Margaid hefting an ancient amban sniper rifle that’s at least a head taller than she is. When Din offers to swap with her, she shoots him a sharp look, cradling the weapon against her chest territorially. He doesn’t bring it up again.

Towards dawn, it becomes clear that the Tuskens have cleared off. There’s been no shooting for at least an hour, and the chemical fire seems to be mostly under control. He and Margaid sit with their backs against the corrugated iron wall of the garage, watching the noxious black smoke billow against the lightening horizon. 

‘I can’t do it anymore, you know,’ Margaid murmurs, sounding raw. 

‘Can’t do what?’

She turns her head lazily to look at him, smirking slightly, sadly. ‘I’m sure Cobb told you. Or, at least, I’m sure he implied. Why I live all the way out here.’

‘He lives here too.’

Margaid shrugs, scrunching her nose up. ‘He has an excuse. His family owned this plot, a long time ago – his parents or his grandparents, I forget which. It’s a sentimental thing. Me, I’m out here because I’m _dangerous._ ’ She snarls at him, teeth bared, claws raised – a child’s idea of what a monster looks like. Then she deflates. ‘But I can’t do that anymore – shift into my other form. I’ve been on suppressors since I was fourteen.’

Din blinks. ‘Why didn’t you say anything? When you and Sorrell first got married?’

‘Because I have no interest in living amongst people who would never accept me the way I am naturally,’ Margaid says, glaring at the distant smudge of Mos Pelgo on the horizon. ‘I didn’t _choose_ to live like this. If I could change, I would. The first time I was given an injection, I nearly broke the guy’s arm. But by the time I got out – by the time Sorrell _got me_ out – it was already too late. If I went off of the suppressors now, it’d probably kill me.’

There’s a story there, Din knows. The same way there’s a story behind the scar on Cobb’s temple, behind his own silent recalcitrance. He knows not to ask. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ he says, instead.

Margaid smiles, grimly. ‘You wanted to go with Cobb. To fight. And you were angry that he made you stay here with me. But without Sorrell I really am all on my own out here, and I’m not as tough as everybody likes to think.’ The draws her knees up to her chin, closing her eyes. ‘I’m trying to say thank you, I guess. For staying. I hope you won’t have to do it again.’

They sit like that – Margaid dozing, Din keeping watch – until Cobb’s speeder appears on the horizon, puttering along at around five-miles-an-hour. Din nudges Margaid awake, who – seeing the way the speeder is swerving ominously from side-to-side – rolls her eyes.

‘Sorrell,’ she says, clambering to her feet. ‘Abysmal driver. I’m surprised they haven’t killed themself riding to work on that speeder-bike of theirs – themself _or_ anybody else.’

Sorrell does manage to come to a lurching stop, though not without stalling the engine first. They grin, sheepishly, as smoke billows out from beneath the hood.

‘How you ever got your license is anybody’s guess,’ Margaid exclaims.

‘Lovely to see you too, dear.’

They kiss, though Margaid immediately pulls away, spitting and wiping her mouth. ‘Dank farrik, you taste terrible! And you smell worse!’

‘Yes, well, eight hours down a mine shaft and another eight putting out fires will do that to a person.’

Sorrell is, indeed, covered in grime, as is Cobb, who’s riding pillion. He’s slumped against Sorrell’s back, utterly boneless.

‘Oh, he’s alright,’ Sorrell says, noticing Din’s alarmed stare, ‘Man’s just bushed.’ Grinning, the miner butts their helmet back against Cobb’s own, waking him up with a groan.

‘Kriffin’ bishwag,’ Cobb grumbles, tugging his helmet off. His hair is sticking up in several sweat-matted tufts, and there’s a sore-looking indent across the bridge of his nose from where the visor has been digging into his skin. He’s squinting like he’s so tired he can barely keep his eyes open, and Din – sleep-deprived, awash with relief – thinks that he’s the most beautiful man he’s ever seen.

‘Mind taking him off my hands?’ Sorrell asks, a knowing glint in their eye. ‘Marg and I are gonna ride back into town and pick up my bike.’

Din agrees, amicably, and together he and Sorrell half-lift, half-drag Cobb from the speeder.

‘I can walk,’ Cobb complains, in a voice that’s been completely ruined by smoke inhalation.

‘We know, big man, we know,’ Sorrell says, patting him on the flank. ‘Make sure you get him into the sonic,’ they say to Din, ‘Tuskens were using some kind of incendiary munitions. I don’t know how much of it got under his armour.’

Din nods. He has questions – since when have the Tuskens used anything as advanced as incendiary bombs? – but it’s beginning to heat up outside and he doubts Sorrell has any of the answers anyway. He hooks an arm around Cobb’s waist and begins, carefully, to haul him down the stairs. Behind them, he can hear Margaid and Sorrell arguing.

‘Like hell I am letting you drive! Get away from that thing before you kill somebody.’

‘Okay, okay, cool your jets. I’m fine, by the way! No need to ask me how my day was.’

‘Alright, Sorrell, _how was your day?_ ’

‘Oh, just great. Spent all night looking for a seam that didn’t exist, then came home to find the town on fire…’ 

‘Marital bliss,’ Din mutters, and Cobb barks out a surprised laugh, teeth incongruously white in his soot-blackened face.

**________________________**

Cobb stays in the refresher for a long time – so long, Din gets restless and resolves to make them both breakfast. It’s still mostly dark outside, but the stress has made him hungry, and he can only imagine that Cobb feels the same way, if not worse. He hasn’t quite perfected hard-boiled massiff egg, but he can brew caf and make toast soldiers just fine. 

Eventually, the low whirr of the sonic ceases, and a moment later, Din hears the cubical door clatter open. There’s some muffled cursing.

‘Cobb?’ he calls, ‘… Everything okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Cobb replies, sounding strained, ‘I’m fine, just – kriff! _Fuck!_ ’

Din reaches instinctively for the med-kit mounted on the kitchen wall. ‘Burns?’ he hazards.

‘A couple, yeah,’ Cobb mutters, striding out into the living area. There’s suddenly a whole lot of tanned, naked skin on display – Cobb’s wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. Din casts his gaze to the ceiling, uttering a silent prayer to _Mand’alor_.

‘Shit feels like trying to peel hot wax.’

‘There’s some rubbing alcohol in the med-kit.’

‘Be a dear, then,’ Cobb sighs, collapsing onto one of the kitchen barstools. He looks better, now that he’s used the sonic, but only nominally so. Din suspects it’s worry as much as fatigue that’s drained his face of its colour.

‘Where does it hurt the worst?’ he asks.

Cobb scoffs. ‘Everywhere.’ Then, after a moment’s contemplation: ‘… My back.’

After some searching, Din manages to dig up a pair of tweezers, a mostly empty tube of bacta gel, and a box of plasters to deploy alongside the rubbing alcohol. He ferries it around to Cobb’s side of the counter, less rattled by his state of undress now that he has a task to focus on. To his credit, when he sees the brand, Din doesn’t drop all of his newly gleaned supplies with a horrified gasp, but he does suck in a quick, muted breath. But Cobb hears it, all the same.

‘Pretty gruesome, huh?’ he says, adding, in a weak attempt at levity: ‘I hear all of the best syndicates are using lasers now – more sanitary.’ 

The mark is located high on Cobb’s back: a many-pointed star nestled right between his shoulder blades. The branding itself was done crudely, badly – Din can spot where the skin had become infected during the healing process, rippling and scarring over, ruining the design’s brutal symmetry. Beneath it is a scrawl of Basic about four inches across, with repetitions in Weequay and Huttese.

‘Date-of-birth. Blood type. Surgical history.’ Cobb glances over his shoulder at Din, gauging his level of understanding. ‘… In case I died.’

‘The meat market.’ Din feels his gorge begin to rise.

’No sense in letting two good kidneys go to waste just because some stupid kid fell down a mineshaft.’

‘Cobb…’ he murmurs, wanting desperately to smooth the flat of his palm over the mark, to make it disappear. He even experiences the bizarre, fleeting urge to press his lips against it, like a parent kissing well a child’s scraped knee. _There. All better._

‘Ah, I’m alright,’ Cobb says, loudly. Blustering. ‘I hardly even think about it these days – just like any other scar. Only, if I get my head caved in by some sandtusker, this one’s a handy way of identifying the body, so. There’s that.’

‘It’s monstrous. _They’re_ – monstrous. I… I wish I could –’

‘Slaughter them?’ Cobb says, a little sharply, ‘Believe me, I wanted to do the same. But the Hutts beat both of us to the punch. Moved in and snuffed them all once the mine went bust. Those that survived fled Tatooine, changed their names.’ He deflates, shoulders sagging. ‘I ain’t got any anger left in me no more. At least not for that lot.’

Din does. Din is _seething_. This is a recent development – at his age, he’d thought himself long since inured to feelings of intense rage, intense despair. Grogu had changed that. Perhaps not for the better, Din thinks – it is awful, to have this much anger and nowhere to put it.

‘Din,’ Cobb says, breaking him out of his reverie. His hand is lightly grasping at Din’s own, which is clenched, white-knuckled atop the kitchen counter. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kidded about it – slavery’s no laughing matter. But for those of us who grew up on this backwards-ass planet, things like that are just a fact of life. You learn to accept it.’ 

‘Not you,’ Din objects, ‘You did something about it. You and the townsfolk.’

‘Well, that we did,’ Cobb agrees, cracking a smile. ‘And now _you_ can do something about these kriffin’ burn marks. I don’t need my back any more scarred up than it already is.’

**________________________**

It’s slow going. Whatever concoction the Tuskens had used to make their bombs – a mixture of a gelling agent and some kind of outdated petroleum fuel, Din suspects – the resulting residue is nearly impossible to wash out. The two of them spend a painful hour scrubbing away at Cobb’s back with the rubbing alcohol and a wire scour, pausing for breakfast before Din moves in with the tweezers to remove any lingering remnants. It’s a good thing Cobb’s home is so far removed from Mos Pelgo proper – Din doubts that the town’s parents want their children exposed to Marshal Vanth’s profane and extensive vocabulary. 

At last, by around seven o’clock, Cobb’s back is properly debrided. Din seals some plasters over the worst of it, and slathers everything else in bacta gel. There’ll be some peeling, he tells Cobb, and some minor discoloration, but no scars. Cobb thanks him, unable to muster even a smile at this point.

‘I suppose you’ll be wanting an explanation,’ he says.

And Din does, urgently. But he also can’t stand to look at Cobb when he’s like this: bone-tired, injured, and still faintly humiliated from having Din see his slave’s brand, though he hides it well. ‘What I _want_ ,’ he says, packing away the med-kit, ‘is for you to get a few hours rest. We can talk over lunch.’

**________________________**

There’s little else for Din to do, once Cobb has bedded down for the morning. He rinses the few dishes he’d used to make breakfast, and places them in the drying rack. From downstairs, he hears Cobb grumble some vague command for Din to go back to his own unit and sleep. Din ignores him, collecting Cobb’s discarded plastoid armour from outside and giving it a thorough wipe down. The familiarity of the task serves to centre him somewhat, though it quickly becomes apparent that he’s going to need a pressure hose to remove some of the more stubborn patches of residue. Other pieces are utterly unsalvageable, the incendiary gel having melted through the plastoid down to the glove beneath.

The chemical mixture must burn at an incredibly high-temperature, and for much longer than any standard incendiary munitions. Din whispers a prayer of thanks that only a small amount of the stuff seeped under Cobb’s armour. He can’t be exactly sure what would have happened had he taken a direct hit to the head, or to some exposed part of his body, but his mind is certainly able to conjure up some particularly lurid images. 

Feeling more nauseous than he has in days, Din brews himself a pot of Jo’s H’kak bean tea, knowing by now that it will help to settle his stomach. Afterwards, he goes to check on Margaid and Sorrell, who he’d heard return earlier that morning. His knocking goes unanswered, and when he peers in through the window, he sees why. The two are tangled up on the daybed together, fast asleep. Sorrell has their face pillowed against Margaid’s stomach, and Margaid’s paws are buried in Sorrell’s long, dark hair, kneading softly.

Din can’t help but watch them for a moment, though he knows he should leave. His line of work hadn’t often allowed him access to such scenes of domesticity, and whenever it did, he’d always found himself strangely fascinated, and more than a little nostalgic – though for what he doesn’t know. Were his parents affectionate with each other? Had they ever held each other like this? He can’t remember. His mother had worked long hours, and his father had been quiet, taciturn – though never unkind. They’d lived their lives hand-to-mouth, and probably hadn’t had much time to be tender with one another. Though they’d always been tender with him.

When Sorrell stirs slightly, snuffling in their sleep, Din backs away from the window, feeling as if he has been caught doing something illicit. He retreats to his own unit, which is still relatively cool inside, and strips off for a sonic. Sand has snuck its way into his hair after a night spent outside, and he keeps finding patches of skin on his hands and arms that are tacky from coming into contact with the incendiary residue.

 _This wouldn’t be a problem if I’d been wearing my beskar’gam,_ he thinks to himself, but it’s a half-hearted admonishment. Even after Cobb had left to defend Mos Pelgo, Din hadn’t gone back to fetch his armour. At the time, he’d chalked it up to not wanting to leave Margaid alone. Now, he thinks that perhaps he simply hadn’t felt the need for it. Not like he used to. 

When it’s well past midday and Cobb still hasn’t woken, Din breaks his ‘til now adhered to rule against snooping. It’s not really snooping if there’s sufficient cause for worry, he reasons, creeping down the stairwell as quietly as he can. Din wouldn’t put it past Cobb to conceal a more serious injury from him – he might have slipped into a coma while Din was busy freshening himself up. That, and – well. Din sort of just wants a look at Cobb’s bedroom. It’s been the hallmark of some of his more prurient fantasies, after all.

It is, like the rest of Cobb’s unit, sparse but comfortable, with certain attempts made towards décor that raise it a degree above the average bachelor pad. The bed, low and large, takes up most of the room’s space. As it happens, the sheets are _not_ limned in moonlight – Din has perhaps watched one too many romantic holodramas – but small windows mounted high in the wall let in enough light to see by. Cobb is curled on his side atop the bed linens, an arm folded beneath his head. He’s still shirtless, though he has, thankfully, put some pants on.

Din stands there for a long moment, debating over whether or not to wake him, before deciding that it would be too cruel. He fetches the book he’s been reading from upstairs, parks himself in the wicker chair beside the bed, and resolves to wait until he’s at least halfway finished before making any kind of noise.

Cobb, Din discovers, is a very quiet sleeper. Once, he sighs, heavily, and mumbles something incoherent to himself, but otherwise he’s utterly silent. Logically, this should make it easier for Din to focus on his novel, only he continually finds his gaze sidling away from the page and over to Cobb.

He is, Din thinks, ridiculously good looking. He can admit this to himself with only a small degree of embarrassment, as it’s less a statement of feeling and more a statement of fact. Margaid jokes about it all the time. She claims that all of the single townswomen – and some of the married ones, too – are hopelessly besotted with him. ‘I say _hopelessly_ because, well,’ she’d raised an eyebrow at Din, ‘That bocatt just won’t bite.’

But there’s a hardness to him, too. A way of moving, a way of looking peering out at the world, guarded, that speaks of a lifetime of deprivation. Asleep, his mouth half-open, a hand tucked beneath his cheek, Cobb looks almost _boyish_.

Din wants to kiss him. The sudden intensity with which this impulse grips him catches him off guard. _Stupid,_ Din thinks, turning to glare resolutely down at his book. _You don’t even know how to kiss._

It’s a good thing he manages to tear his gaze away when he does, because a moment later Cobb stirs, grunting softly and thumbing the sleep from his eyes. He sees Din, opens his mouth to say something, and grimaces. There’s a jug of water on the nightstand. Din pours Cobb a glass and determinedly _does not_ watch as he quaffs it down, water dripping from his chin.

‘Much obliged,’ Cobb rasps, eventually, wiping his mouth. ‘All that smoke did a number on me.’

Din motions to pour him another glass, but Cobb arrests the movement, catching him by the forearm. ‘Hey,’ he croaks, a crease forming between his brows, ‘How’d that…’ He raises a hand to Din’s chin, fingers brushing over it lightly.

It takes Din a heart-hammering moment to realize Cobb’s peering at the bruise that must have formed there. ‘Tripped and bumped it,’ he answers, sounding slightly breathless.

‘Both of us’ve been in the wars, huh?’ Cobb murmurs, smiling.

 _I want to kiss him,_ Din thinks, the thought surfacing once again, unbidden. ‘The Tuskens,’ he blurts, wanting desperately to change the subject.

Cobb, smile shrinking back a couple of notches, withdraws his hand. ‘Yeah… The Tuskens…’

He begins to explain. The story is, it turns out, a great deal shorter than Din’s had been. About two months after killing the krayt dragon, certain things had begun to go missing around town – mining equipment, vaporator parts, drums of water. One memorable night, an entire family of bantha were spirited away – three adolescents, a pregnant ewe, and a prized stud – which, Cobb remarks, must have been quite a challenge, given how temperamental bulls become during the mating season.

‘You’d need to know animals well. Would need to have worked with ‘em your whole life, just about.’

‘And you thought Sand People,’ Din says, handing him a fresh glass of water.

Cobb takes a grateful sip, making a noncommittal sound. ‘Mm… Well, at first, we tried not to, on account of the truce – which so far they’d been upholding, mind. I thought perhaps it was some stragglers from the Mining Collective, looking to get their revenge. But then, Pedge caught them in the act one night, trying to lift his vaporator, and – well. You know what they look like. Pretty distinctive folks.’

‘It was night,’ Din says, ‘And dark. Is he sure he didn’t just see somebody in desert camouflage, sand-goggles?’

‘No, Pedge says he was certain, on account of the bulb by the door. And he heard them speaking.’

 _Sure he did,_ Din thinks. Or maybe Pedge just wanted to go back to the way things were. Maybe he didn’t like paying dividends to a group of people who’d made his life a living hell the past several years. Maybe he’d lied, pinned the theft on the Tuskens when it was really just a group of scavengers – some Jawas, perhaps. A lie like that would be enough to fracture an already fragile peace.

As if able to read his thoughts, Cobb jumps to the defence. ‘Pedge wouldn’t make a thing like that up, Din. He’s not an idiot.’

‘I’ve seen people do a lot worse over much less.’

‘Not Pedge,’ Cobb repeats, his gaze steely, ‘Some of the other folks in town, maybe. But Pedge and I worked the mines together. _Grew up_ together, practically. He wouldn’t risk Mos Pelgo over something as petty as revenge. Not after all we’ve been through to get ourselves here.’

Din, feeling a little cowed, acquiesces. ‘What happened after that? I imagine you were the first person he told.’

‘First and only, is how I wanted to keep it. Figured I could sort things out quietly. But by the time the Tuskens arrived in town to trade that week, word had gotten out. Feelings were running high, and the poor bastards didn’t even speak enough Basic to understand what’d gotten everybody in such a lather. In the end, I had to shoo them off, schedule a meeting at their camp – the folks round here were that close to rioting.’ Cobb pauses, scratching at his beard. He looks troubled.

 _Good people,_ Din remembers him saying, during their first dinner together. _Good people, but scared._

‘Anyway,’ he sighs, ‘That’s where I was the night you rolled into town – or, should I say, _staggered_ into town. You can imagine how surprised I was when I got back. Thought maybe I had sunstroke.’

 _The good kind of surprised, or the bad kind of surprised?_ Din wonders, though doesn’t ask. ‘What happened at the meeting?’ 

Cobb gulps down another few mouthfuls of water before answering. ‘Well,’ he says, coughing slightly, ‘Firstly, I brought them a cannister of bantha milk, to make amends for the big furore back in town. Then they demanded I drink some of theirs, which is apparently traditional – though nobody thought to tell me. They got this way of fermenting it: tastes like rocket fuel and hits you about just as hard. One glass turned into ten, and I spent most of the first morning there sleeping off my hangover.’

Din can’t stop the corner of his mouth from quirking up. ‘Not exactly conduct befitting of a town marshal.’

‘They’re very persuasive,’ Cobb protests, grinning sheepishly. ‘… Anyway, come mid-morning, my sight had thankfully returned, and the clan leader, A’muun, invited me into his tent. And then we talked – or thereabouts. I’m still learning the –’ Cobb makes the Tusken gesture for _greetings,_ ‘— hand signals.’ 

‘What did you say?’

‘I told him Tuskens had been raiding the town, stealing our _water_ and our _banthas_.’ Din watches, more than a little impressed, as Cobb makes the equivalent hand gestures. ‘Ironically, there’s no word in the Tusken vocabulary for _raiders,_ since they believe everything on Tatooine belongs to them anyway, but I think he got the gist. His folks had been stealing from my folks.’

‘And what did he say?’

Cobb has another sip of water, shrugging. ‘He said it was the first he’d heard of it. That, if anybody from his clan has been breaking the truce, they’ll be severely punished – which, I don’t have to tell you, is no idle threat, coming from a Tusken.’

‘And you believed him?’ 

‘Yeah, funnily enough, I did,’ Cobb says, smiling wistfully, ‘He was just… He was telling the truth. I _know_ it. I got a knack for that sort of thing.’

‘Bet the townsfolk didn’t see it the same way.’

‘That they did not,’ Cobb agrees, wincing, ‘Everybody told me I was being too lenient. Demanded we schedule a round-the-clock patrol, and that I be the one to head it – which is why I’ve been getting up at the crack of dawn and coming home late these past few weeks.’

‘Why didn’t you _say_ something?’ Din demands, exasperation seeping into his tone. He thinks of all the days Cobb has walked through the door, tugging sleepily at his armour, mouth a grim, humourless line. ‘Cobb, I could’ve helped.’

‘I didn’t think I needed any,’ Cobb objects. ‘After my meeting with A’muun, that was the end of it. No more stolen equipment. No more disappearing banthas. The way I figured it, some bored teenage Tuskens were having some fun at our expense, and after I tattled, A’muun gave them a thorough hiding.’

‘Until last night.’

‘Until last night,’ Cobb agrees, grimly, ‘Now I don’t know what to kriffin’ think.’

‘I take it you’ve called another meeting?’

‘I sent Jo off to their camp the moment we put the fires out. She’s got a good friend in the ranks, and she’s better at speaking Tusken than I am. I figure we should do our best to be diplomatic about all this.’

Din feels an absurd swell of pride. He thinks of Cobb’s first meeting with the Tuskens – the belligerent posturing, the snide comments. The childish argument about the melon water that he’d had to break up with his flame-thrower. It was amazing what overcoming a terrible evil like the krayt dragon could do for interpersonal relationships. Din should know – most of his friendships seem to be fire-forged these days.

‘When do they arrive?’

Cobb, caught in the middle of an incredibly satisfying, joint-snapping stretch, grimaces broadly. ‘Midday tomorrow,’ he groans, ‘If the gods are willing and the krayt don’t rise – which it frequently does. More than likely, the two of us will be going on another little midnight jaunt soon enough – for the best, I think, given the tensions in town. Under cover of darkness and all.’ 

Din starts. ‘You’ll let me come, then?’

‘If I tried to stop you, would you take me at my word?’ Cobb says, raising an eyebrow.

‘Probably not.’

‘Didn’t think so.’ Cobb reaches over, slapping him on the knee. ‘Welcome aboard, Deputy Djarin. Can’t say the pay’s very good, but hey – you get my sparkling company.’

**________________________**

The Tuskens’ estimated time of arrival was extremely optimistic, it turns out. Midday comes and goes, the suns sinking from their zenith as he and Cobb wander around the housing complex, too keyed up to actually commit to any sort of task.

‘You should sleep some more,’ Din says, watching Cobb gnaw on a hangnail.

Cobb shakes his head. ‘Can’t stop kriffin’ coughing. Throat’s drier than that Jundland Wastes.’

‘Maybe you should try some of Jo’s special tea.’

‘Har-dee-har.’

As if summoned, Jo herself arrives not long after that, buzzing into earshot on her _Undicur_ -class jumpspeeder. There’s a Tusken Raider riding pillion, loose-fitting robes flapping in the wind. Cobb waves at them to park around back, and Jo raises her middle finger in cheerful affirmation.

‘Worried about an angry mob turning up at your door?’ Din murmurs, watching the duo approach. ‘Pitchforks and torches?’

‘A little,’ Cobb admits, ‘Also, the garage only has space for three.’

A few minutes later, Jo is bounding down the central stairway two steps at a time, her Tusken friend close in tow. Both of them are caked in sand, and Jo has a nasty sunburn across the bridge of her nose. Despite this, she walks with a spring in her step, grinning widely.

‘Freak sandstorm,’ she explains, tugging off her helmet, ‘A’muun and his travelling party are hunkering down under B’Thazoshe Bridge, gonna wait it out.’

‘Any idea of when they’ll be here?’ Cobb asks.

Jo spits out a wad of sand, and, noting Cobb’s foreboding look, wipes her mouth contritely. ‘A’muun says sundown, weather guru says longer. Both were pretty insistent. I think they have a bet going.’

‘Great,’ Cobb sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose, ‘At least somebody’s getting some enjoyment out of all this.’

Jo turns her attention to Din, smiling brilliantly. ‘Mando! Good to see you up and walking. How’s the old noddle?’

‘Holding out,’ Din says, thumbing at the scar behind his ear.

‘You still drinking my tea?’

‘Cobb ties me up every morning and funnels it down my throat.’ 

‘Ha! ‘Least he’s good for something!’

She introduces Din to her Tusken friend, I’yana, who wears the indigo-dyed cowl and robe of a young, unmarried woman – one of around Jo’s own age, if the cadence of her voice is any indicator. Din makes the traditional hand sign for _greetings_ – an open palm, pressed flat to the chest and then swept outward – adding that he hopes her journey to Mos Pelgo was safe.

The girl shrinks back a little, shy, but replies in faltering Basic, her words muffled by her mask: ‘Jo uses… too much speed.’

‘You’ve only ever ridden banthas,’ Jo argues back, in passable Tusken, ‘You’d think a repulsorlift was too fast.’

‘I have to say I’m agreement with I’yana on this one,’ Cobb announces, grinning. ‘And as the man who issued Josefina her driver’s license – much to my own personal peril – I believe that I’m somewhat of an authority on the matter.’

A dark flush appears beneath Jo’s sunburn, though she plays it off well. Certainly better than Din ever could. ‘If you’re finished embarrassing me in front of my friend, marshal, I am in _dire_ need of a sonic. I’yana too, if you’re amenable.’

‘‘Course,’ Cobb says, stepping aside, ‘But coveralls come off at the door.’

‘Yes, mother.’

‘Your cloak too, I’yana,’ Cobb signs, to which the Tusken girl replies with a universal thumbs-up. They bundle into Cobb’s unit, I’yana muttering something into Jo’s ear that makes her laugh, loudly. Din can’t help but note their loosely clasped hands.

‘That’s just what we need,’ Cobb sighs, watching them go. ‘Love across the picket-line.’ 

**________________________**

They eat a sparse dinner around the firepit in the courtyard – Din, Cobb, Jo, I’yana, and Margaid, who in particular is thrilled to have somebody new to talk to. If there’s any ill-feeling between she and Jo, they both hide it well enough. If her unlikely friendship with a Tusken Raider is anything to go by, Jo is probably a great deal more forward-thinking than the rest of the townsfolk, and Din suspects she only sticks around to care for Grete in her old age. He hopes that she’ll get out of Mos Pelgo, after that. Maybe even go off-world.

But then again, he reflects, watching them whisper and giggle: perhaps she’ll want to stay on Tatooine, with I’yana. Din’s known people to do stupider things, in the name of love.

Eventually, at around nine o’clock, a Tusken messenger arrives on foot, informing them that A’muun and his travelling party have set up camp on a ridge ten miles south. Margaid demands that he stay and eat a meal while Din and Cobb ready themselves for travel, which he begrudgingly assents to. Tuskens only ever remove their facial coverings in front of other Tuskens, and even then, only during special occasions – weddings, birthing ceremonies, funerals. I’yana had eaten her meal beneath a special shroud, as was often the custom. This other Tusken takes the bowl of stew Margaid offers him up to the surface, and quickly wolfs it down in private. 

A well of emotion rises up in Din as he watches them – a tight, strangling feeling that he struggles to put a name to. At first, he thinks it must be homesickness. Albeit, he’d never truly _had_ a home with the _Kyr’tsad_ , and hasn’t lived in a covert since he was an oblate – but he’d lived his life by their edicts, and had found comfort in their familiarity, as the Tuskens obviously find comfort in theirs. 

It’s only when he’s retreated to the silence of his own unit that Din recognises the feeling for what it really is: envy. Envy for people like I’yana, born into and constantly in the company of others who share their beliefs; I’yana, who will never think of herself as a freak, an outlier. Envy too for the flexibility of her religion, for its acknowledgement of her humanity. If I’yana truly loves Jo, then one day she will go to A’muun and ask for his permission to marry her, which in good faith he cannot refuse. I’yana will be able to look upon Jo, her mask and coverings removed, and not feel any shame for it. If they ever have children, those children will know their mother’s face, as any child should.

As Din stares down at his _beskar’gam,_ he finds himself held in a sudden vice-grip of hatred, unable to move. Hatred for the armour, and hatred for the _Kyr’tsad_ , who had raised him to believe it sacrosanct. Hatred for a lifetime spent depriving himself of the things that other people – other _Mandalorians_ , even! – took for granted.

 _Just a kid,_ Cobb had said, and, for the first time in almost forty years, Din allows himself to remember it that way. A shy twelve-year-old, eager to please, being told by the only adults in his life that he can choose to live like them, or be shipped off elsewhere that instant. Who, only five years earlier, had sobbed and cowered in a bunker as his parents were slaughtered up above. A boy who fully believed that the only thing standing between him and a similar such fate were the people who had rescued him, and who were now asking the impossible of him.

He’d said _yes_. Of course he had. All Din had wanted in that moment was not to be left alone again.

It’s all that he wants now, come to think of it.

In the end, he chooses not to don any of his _beskar’gam,_ closing the closet door on it with shaking hands. He’s more than a little disturbed by the intensity of his vitriol. These are the people who saved him, clothed and fed him, read him bedtime stories. He feels a modicum of guilt, but the inclination to wallow in it is a weak one, almost a rote response. He’s spent most of the past two months feeling guilty. Perhaps he’s simply worn out the synapses.

Quickly, he changes out of the baggy clothes Cobb has lent him and into his flight-suit, which offers better insulation against the frigid night air. He straps his _bevii’ragir_ to his back – not so different from a Tusken gaderffii stick, if you squint, and Din doesn’t like the idea of showing up to a negotiation with his blaster.

Cobb is waiting for him under the awning when he emerges, similarly rugged up. ‘Alright?’ he asks, and Din nods, hoping that his cloak conceals his lack of armour. If Cobb notices, he doesn’t say anything.

‘Jo and I’yana have already left. A’nsukh’s going to ride with me, save himself a long walk back. You think your rinky-dink rental can make it another ten miles?’ 

‘It’ll have to.’

Before he can mount his speeder, Cobb stops him, a hand on his arm. He should look ridiculous like this, Din thinks: knitted cap pulled down over his ears, swamped in a bantha-hair coat. Instead, he just looks supremely kissable.

‘Listen,’ he says, grave tone belying the fact that he’s currently dressed like an Ewok. ‘I know that you’ve been living here, and by rights you’ve got as much of a dog in this fight as all the other townsfolk… but that don’t mean you have to come, Din.’

‘I thought we already had this discussion,’ Din mutters, attempting to sidestep him.

Cobb doesn’t budge. ‘We did, and I intend to respect your decision.’ He scratches at the back of his neck, grimacing slightly. ‘But I gotta ask, Din: is it because you feel you owe me?’

Din opens his mouth, then shuts it. _Of course!_ he wants to exclaim, but he knows that’s not what Cobb wants to hear.

‘Because I ain’t gone out of my way for you or anything,’ Cobb continues, ‘Helping someone when they’re sick, putting them up – that’s just common hospitality round these parts. Anyone else would have done the same.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ Din murmurs. And it isn’t. Din knows plenty of people who would have left him to die out there in the sand.

‘Yeah, well, be that as it may. I don’t want you getting dragged into this mess out of some misguided sense of duty. Me, Jo and Grete, Margaid, Ravi – we manage just fine on our own the other three-hundred-and-four days a year. You don’t owe us nothing. As far as we’re concerned, _we_ still owe _you_ , on account of the whole getting swallowed by a dragon thing. So, if you want to get on your speeder and get the hell out of kwath before this all goes belly up, I’ll understand completely. Nobody will think any less of you.’

‘Are you quite finished?’ Din asks, deadpan.

Cobb sucks his teeth, squinting off at the horizon. ‘Yeah, I reckon I about am,’ he says, after a moment. 

‘Good, because it’s freezing out here and A’nsukh is starting to get impatient.’

Cobb laughs, and, despite all of his protestations, there’s a palpable air of relief in it. ‘I take it that means you’re still coming?’

‘Oh yes. I’m eager to witness your newfound skills in diplomacy.’

Cobb grins, throwing a leg over his speeder. ‘I prefer the term _aggressive negotiations_.’ 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:  
> \- A character is attacked with an incendiary agent, similar to napalm. Though they are largely unharmed, they experience minor burns to their back and shoulders.  
> \- A character was branded by slavers. The branding was done very poorly and has scarred over.  
> \- A character mentions the "meat market" (illegal organ trade). While this is only referenced briefly, the idea could be disturbing to some readers.


End file.
